Radio
Civil approach
Michael Vestey
The first of the two-part The Whitehall Village on Radio Four last week (Tuesday) was a gentle stroll through the Civil Ser- vice, what it does and how it has changed and so on, and showed us what decent chaps and sweeties the boys and girls of Whitehall really are, as they beaver away to make life for us even more difficult than it is already. The presenter was Romola Christopherson, a former civil servant, so there wasn't much in the way of revelation from her friends.
Christopherson wanted to know what blunders Sir Richard Wilson, the present Cabinet secretary and head of the home Civil Service, might have made in his long career. Wilson described a catastrophe of such magnitude that one wondered how he had survived. As private secretary to Nicholas Ridley in the Heath government, he was asked to fetch some drinks to cele- brate the result of negotiations with the shipbuilding industry. Finding no minions in the outer office he made what he thought were some gins-and-tonics. Horror of horrors: he'd mixed gin-and-soda instead. No doubt he learned his lesson and can now hand Tony Blair a decent cocktail after a hard Cabinet meeting.
Robin Young (no knighthood yet but don't blink), permanent secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, thought the qualities of the Civil Service that would endure were integrity, impar- tiality and thoroughness. He was struck by how much his EU colleagues admired and envied Whitehall, partly because civil ser- vants gave fearless advice to ministers but also because 'we don't sign up to some- thing without understanding what it is and how we're going to do it'. Unlike, he added, some other countries.
Christopherson said, 'He didn't say which countries and, of course, I didn't ask.' Oh? Why not? Perhaps she knew she'd receive a Sir Humphrey-like reply but it would have been worth a try. No doubt British civil servants do query the mad tor- rent of legislation coming out of Brussels; the trouble is, they and their politicians still cave in most of the time and, worse, gold- plate it when they implement it here. As Milton Friedman said, 'Governments never learn. Only people learn.'
Apart from hearing from low-paid civil servants at benefit offices, most of the pro- gramme was spent talking to the 'fast- stream', the 4 per cent of the 5,000 appli- cants selected annually to rise to the top. Christopherson, however, ventured down to the `non-fast-stream', in the shape of Steve Watts who is now involved in setting up the new Greater London Authority, the Livingstonian Hell that is to be visited on London this year. Watts thought the Civil Service was much less stuffy and hierarchi- cal than when he joined in 1974. People were no longer fixed to their grades and had more responsibilities. What I wanted to know, though, was that as a non-fast- streamer could he become a fast-streamer or were his feet forever cemented to his middle-rank?
Watts was amusing, though, in describing civil servants. 'In some ways civil servants are politicians who didn't have the nerve to be voted for ... none of us has the balls to stand up and be counted ...' Christopher- son seemed to think that Sir Humphrey was dead and Young obligingly agreed that this kind of mandarin was running out of lives. He thought that in two years time he'll no longer be recognisable in the Civil Service. But Wilson told a very Sir Humphrey-type story, of Blair's arrival at No. 10 after his election victory. The staff were lined up clapping when he noticed a woman crying. 'You're crying,' said Blair. 'Yes, I am. I liked that John Major and I'm going to miss him."Oh, I'm sorry."No, you're not,' she said, 'you meant to do it.' Wilson said it was 'nice' that Blair joked about it. But do we know if she's still there? The second of these two pro- grammes this week, produced independent- ly by Martin Cox and Gordon Hutchings, looked at the Civil Service under Blair, though at the time of writing I haven't heard it.
It could certainly have done with more muscle, more probing and a few harsh questions about why we need such a vast bureaucracy and why it makes already unnecessary EU laws into a daily night- mare for small businesses in particular. Christopherson sounds as if she's rather a good broadcaster but is not the person to take this on. Presumably, though, she had the contacts.
I would like to thank a reader who wrote saying how much he enjoyed my comic novel about the BBC, Waning Powers, which he borrowed from his local library. He recognised the name on the spine from this column which he reads regularly. Unfortunately, he didn't enclose an address so I can't reply personally. His signature looked like Roger Boyers and his note was marked possibly 'Gates Bassethby' which I can't find in my Bartholomew's. If he cares to contact me I will reply to some of the points he raised.
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