Trust: would you pass the tiger test at work?
Politics requires the cooperation of people from different backgrounds in different roles and with different skills: but the ingredient which is essential is trust
It was, inevitably, the British Raj which spawned the character assessment of whether someone was “the kind of man you’d go tiger-hunting with”. It may seem a very specific, not to mention dated, way of summing up a colleague or friend, but for those (relatively few) people who administered British imperial power across India, it was a very useful shorthand which everyone would grasp. Essentially, it asked whether someone could be relied upon in a crisis and was the sort of person who could be trusted without a shadow of doubt.
The phrase did once have wider currency in politics, and perhaps examples show its subtle and nuanced meaning better than explanation. During a debate in the House of Lords on the conduct of the war in November 1915, Lord St Davids, a Liberal peer, criticised the government in these terms:
I was recalling to my mind this morning a remark made by the late Mr. Parnell in an emergency of his. He was talking of a gentleman since dead, and he said “He is a very nice gentleman; there is nobody with whom I would rather go to an afternoon tea party. But he is not the man I should choose to go tiger-hunting with.” We are rather in that position. We in this country possess Front Benches composed of statesmen admirable for peace purposes, whom we all admire; but I venture to say there are some of them whom, if we were going tiger-hunting, we would not choose as our companions.
Much later, towards the end of the century, Lord Thomson of Monifieth, one of our first two members of the European Commission appointed in January 1973, said of his fellow UK commissioner, Sir Christopher Soames, that he proved to be “a good man to go tiger-hunting with in the jungles of the Berlaymont”. So perhaps the phrase still has some mileage in it; it will surprise none of my friends that I still summon it up from time to time, and I find it quite a useful descriptor.
All of this is a slightly periphrastic introduction to an essay in which I wish to make a relatively simple point, which is this: in the efficient and effective creation, development and delivery of government policy in the departments of Whitehall, the principal quality which has to be present, the essential bond between men and women of diverse backgrounds, characters, qualifications and personal qualities is trust.
This might seem an odd and cherishably innocent hope for Westminster and Whitehall. Sir Julian Critchley, the Conservative MP, was being polite when he dubbed Parliament the “Palace of Varieties”; Politico remarked that “The UK’s political culture is one of tribal confrontation”, while The New Statesman lamented that “we could be living in a new age of disloyalty”. Edward Luce, writing in The Financial Times, spat bitterly “If ever an ancien regime earned its place in history’s dustbin, it’s Britain’s ruling class”. I understand, therefore, if you are sceptical.
Three groups of people must cooperate closely at the top of Whitehall departments to make them function properly: ministers, who are by definition political animals; civil servants, for whom impartiality and objectivity are core values; and special advisers, who are temporary civil servants but employed to provide advice with a political slant which would be inappropriate for the civil service to deliver. All three groups have different profiles, all have different, perhaps competing priorities, but unless they can work in harmony the department will not work as it should and could to deliver the government’s priorities.
You know all of this but it’s worth a recap. Ministers are there to provide strategy and direction. They set priorities for the department, represent it to the outside world and engage on a political level with their colleagues across Whitehall. They bring ideas, they decide who the department’s allies and stakeholders are, and, hugely importantly and forgotten at peril, they speak for the department in Parliament. This is something ministers can neglect but shouldn’t. They derive their power and influence from the House of Commons, and, technically, it is the Commons which grants the government its budget (and its ability to raise taxes).
Ministers must answer oral question in the Commons, usually an hour-long session scheduled according to a rota but roughly once every five weeks; they must respond as appropriate to urgent questions and make statements; they must speak in subject-themed debates; and, an important task, they must when required take legislation through the House of Commons, from second reading, through public bill committee stage to report stage and third reading. This is a relatively rare task: on average the government passes around 30 bills a session, there are 23 ministerial departments and each ministerial team can have five or six ministers, so you can do the “math” and see that the finger of fate will not point at an individual very often. But it is intense: while the early stages are broad-brush, the detailed scrutiny of a bill is exhaustive and exhausting, requiring ministers to put in long hours and be completely across the detail of the proposed legislation.
Senior civil servants have a very different role. They are much less public-facing, although any official must always walk in the shadow of an appearance before a select committee; they at least have the comfort of knowing that according to Parliament’s Osmotherly Rules a committee will not summon individual civil servants by name. The task of senior officials is, to over-simplify, tripartite: to suggest policy, to develop and implement policy, and to manage the mechanisms of the department. Forty years after it was first screened, many of us probably still reach for Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby as our most familiar model of the senior civil servant, and Private Eye still refers to top officials as “the current Sir Humphrey” and so on. There is an argument to be had over whether Appleby was/is an accurate or helpful depiction, but it is certainly worth noting that the character was portraying the Civil Service of 1980, before the bulk of the Thatcher revolution, before widespread computer use, before the introduction of the UK’s fourth (!) television channel… Mapping current permanent secretaries and directors-general onto a model of that vintage is not a helpful exercise.
Whitehall officials are in many ways the policy funnel, or perhaps sausage-machine. If ministers provide strategy and ideas, it is the civil servants who must work out how to transform a ministerial notion into direct policy execution at an individual level, whether it be the fine detail of marginal tax or the overall policy on sentencing of offenders. They have an additional role which is to interpret ministerial ideas within the law and the rules (especially financial) of government. This is where officials must make mental compromises. The Civil Service is impartial and does not—or should not—have a “political” view on issues. The only reason a permanent secretary should have for objecting to a policy which involves expenditure is that it breaches guidelines on regularity, propriety, value for money or feasibility, in which case he or she may request a ministerial direction from the secretary of state: effectively, a letter from the department’s political boss saying that the official head has raised objections but is being overruled.
Special advisers are perhaps a little misunderstood. Their role, as temporary civil servants with an expressly political agenda, began in 1964 with Harold Wilson’s arrival in office as he appointed people like Thomas Balogh, Nicholas Kaldor and John Allen to advisory positions. They too were portrayed in Yes, Minister—Frank Weisel was Jim Hacker’s SpAd but was quickly frozen out and sidelines by Sir Humphrey’s wiles—but they became widely identified under Tony Blair and thereafter, with the spotlight shining on people like Alastair Campbell, Charlie Whelan, Jo Moore, Damian McBride, Andy Coulson and Craig Oliver. It is arguable that this public profile has not been helpful, as their role has been exposed but is still often misunderstood. Nick Hillman, himself a SpAd in the coalition, remarked that “special advisers are like poisoners: either famous or good at their job”.
I have come to the conclusion that “special adviser” is a misnomer, now if not when the role began. Many SpAds are more like attendants, courtiers, fixers, gofers and confessors, and they often become very close to the ministers whom they serve: more than one have told me that “your minister becomes the person you see most of, including your family”. Many SpAds are young, and no wonder. The role is intense and draining, and many stay for only a year or two after which they are ready to move on. I say they are ill-named because the most common perception is that they are concerned primarily with presentation, with communications and spin and media impact, which does not seem to fit with the idea of an “adviser”. There are, of course, SpAds who are much more policy-focused: Maurice Peston (father of Robert) was a string influence on Reg Prentice at the Department of Education and Science in 1974 and 1975; Jack Straw was so effective as a SpAd to Peter Shore at the Department of the Environment from 1976 to 1977 that Patrick Jenkin, the Conservative front-bencher, said he was “very much respected by the department—they thought he was the best special adviser any minister had ever had”; while Simon Stevens, who advised Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn as health secretaries from 1997 to 2003 had a huge impact on the Blair approach to the health service and on the NHS Plan 2000 in particular, later becoming chief executive of the NHS.
Nevertheless, the greatest part of SpAds’ activity is presentation and media handling, and that needs energy, contacts, charm, menace, patience and persuasion. But that is not what people picture when they hear the word “adviser”. They imagine, I think, someone wise, or cunning, or experienced, a Grima Wormtongue or a Père Joseph, to use both ends of the spectrum, taking in Rasputin, Thomas Cromwell and Colonel House along the way. They are generally young and in a hurry: the median age is around 33 (so many are younger) and the average tenure is between one and two years. Their role, as we discussed above, is to provide that degree of political and partisan support, advice and feedback which civil servants cannot. They are bound by a code of conduct, but it is one written with their particular purpose in mind. In the end, their job, their effectiveness and their working pattern will be determined first and foremost by their relationship with their minister.
Knowing the British political system as we do, we would not be surprised to find that our three groups tend to come from similar backgrounds. To take an example at random, if we look at the Department for Levelling-up, Housing and Communities, the secretary of state, Michael Gove, attended an independent day school in Aberdeen and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; one of his SpAds, Henry Newman, was a student at Christ Church, Oxford; and the permanent secretary of the department, Jeremy Pocklington, went to an independent day school in Manchester and Exeter College, Oxford. Not enormously diverse. (I will not dwell on the very real if niche diversity between LMH, Christ Church and Exeter.) The tribes are not universally uniform, but one would expect some strong similarities.
So why do I say trust is so important? It is because it is the only quality which can reliably tie together the priorities, loyalties and working methods of our three tribes. With it must come a culture of almost-complete openness and honesty (though of course there must remain areas where confidentiality is necessary). The guiding principle of departmental leadership in Whitehall must be that everyone is working towards the same goal, which is the successful creation, development and delivery of government policy. There will be differences in nuance—often ministers and therefore special advisers will be more attracted by short-term public impact, while officials may try to look beyond the horizon and try to achieve long-term, sustainable success—but with goodwill and intelligence these differences can be minimised and a common objective which fulfils much of each group’s priorities.
Suspicion is a cancer in government departments. It is a tragedy that it seems to be at a high level at the moment: ministers and political observers seem to suspect civil servants of groupthink, particularly on Brexit, which, the theory goes, most officials opposed and to which many are still not reconciled. I don’t know the extent to which this is true. Certainly, I know civil servants who are fully in the grip of haughty, nihilistic despair and disdain, believing that the electorate, out of ignorance or prejudice, made a catastrophic error from which we may never recover save by rejoining the European Union; however, I know others who, irrespective of their views on the 2016 referendum, see the way forward for the UK as making the best of where we are, trying to identify opportunities for new policy which were previously not there, and minimising the adverse effects. I could not say how large each group is.
Civil servants also sometimes seem to regard ministers and their entourages as an occupying army, a chaotic mob which has somehow stormed the Establishment’s ramparts. That is a perilous mind-set. As a quasi-civil servant in the Commons, of course there were times when I had to pursue courses of action with which I was not personally in sympathy (at the behest of the internal administration as well as of Members of Parliament, I may say). I’m sure—indeed, I can recall—that in my more irritable moments I complained bitterly and at length to (hopefully) sympathetic friends and colleagues, but I am equally certain that even at the time I knew it was simply a release valve. Never in my mind was the idea that a policy once determined could be thwarted or diverted. Without wanting to be prissy or holier-than-thou, it would have been wrong, as I knew what I had signed up for and I was employed to act at the direction of elected representatives. (One of my more eccentric colleagues once said her wisest ever words in an internal meeting when, asked by the chair who our “stakeholders” were, a novice said “The public”. “No!” she said sharply. “Members are our primary stakeholders. They’re why we’re here. The public are their problem.” She was right.)
Openness and trust should be the start of relationships within departments. A new minister should understand that civil servants are there to follow his instructions but also to give advice; he should accept this frankly and without rancour, but in reciprocation he should feel able to be very plain about what he expects from his officials, both in Private Office and more widely.
There is occasional mockery of this in the media. To take one example, Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, may or may not be a bully—I have never worked with him nor had any meaningful contact. However, some of the “accusations” levelled at him seemed to me unfair. He is supposedly obsessed with the formatting of official papers, demands detailed briefings from officials, is impatient with civil servants who come to meetings without knowing all the relevant information in detail, and will not read submissions over a certain length. None of these strictures seem to me prima facie unacceptable. I repeat that I separate them from accusations of bullying and aggressive behaviour, which are of course unacceptable—I have written and spoken out strongly against harassment and bullying here, here and here—but it is a minister’s right to ask that documents are presented to him in a way he likes and that officials bring their A-game to meetings. They can even set out how they prefer their coffee, as Liam Byrne famously did. It is their department and their private office, and they will spend a lot of time there.
All of these little behavioural quirks (not, I stress again, any accusations of bullying and harassment) will be most easily digested if they are set out early, fully and without embarrassment. We all have our individual habits and desires, and I would rather know from the start that a minister was in a better frame of mind if provided with a morning espresso than learn it through bitter experience. Equally, placing a limit on the length of submissions, if it is not carried to extremes, does go some way to ensuring they will be read, and focuses the mind of those drafting them. Even Winston Churchill, a man who was no stranger to prolixity, demanded short and punchy memoranda to improve clarity and reduce the workload on ministers and officials.
Civil servants should expect ministers to understand their roles, but they should make sure if they are in doubt that the political masters understand that officials are there to advise and execute: that their advice will be offered frankly but is, in the final analysis, only advice, and that considered instructions will be carried out as efficiently as possible. They have a duty, however unfair it seems, to communicate what should be obvious (and should be true!), that they have no agenda nor ulterior motives, and that they work impartially, with dedication and with loyalty to the system of government.
Special advisers must adapt to being the bridge between the first two groups, because they overlap with both. Sensible ones appreciate the quality of officials and try to perform a complementary role, without secretive conversations or skulduggery. Good civil servants will appreciate a good SpAd’s value, because the adviser will have a sense of the minister’s mind and intentions. That can be a hugely useful resource to tap, and a sensible special adviser will interact freely and without suspicion. Again, it comes back to my fundamental point. Everyone is aiming at the same objective.
SpAds are the most vulnerable group. They serve purely at their masters’ or mistresses’ pleasure (and, in theory, at that of the prime minister), and if ever a burnt offering to the media gods is needed, the adviser is the most likely candidate. That reinforces the good sense of openness and trust. Would-be Machiavels may prosper for a while, but when events turn on you, you find yourself without friends and you face your fate alone. It simply isn’t worth it.
Know your role in the system. Trust your colleagues and act in a way which makes them trust you. Expect to work hard and sometimes without very much in the way of thanks. And expect, and tolerate, small outbursts which fall below the level of improper behaviour. One of the earliest lessons I learned in the House of Commons is that politicians are human, however much you may doubt it. They are vulnerable and prone to stress, and they bear burdens from a dozen directions. No-one is a saint. Ministers will lose their tempers, as will officials. (It is best if SpAds do not, at least not in company. Keep it for your private time and kick your own furniture.) Do not hold grudges, because you merely perpetuate the grievance. And if possible, try to leave at the end of the day with the air cleared. It is analogous to couples never going to sleep with an argument unresolved. If you can do anything to avoid it, do it.
This is not rocket science. Nor does it come from peerless experience or clinical insight. But I have been around politicians and officials, and I have been in high-pressure situations with them. I have sometimes taken my own advice and sometimes allowed my mood to make me ignore it. But I’ve never looked back and thought the advice was wrong.
Finally, I should say that the Platonic ideal of harmony and efficiency towards which I try to provide a route above only works fully if everyone acts honestly and with trust. You cannot control the behaviour of others. If they insist on scheming or obstructing or procrastinating or arguing, there is not much you can do. But you can look to your own conduct, and do your best. Sometimes it will encourage good behaviour in others, and sometimes it won’t. But you will be able to tell yourself that you did all you could, and really that is all any of us can hope for from a professional situation.