Political commentary
The bureaucracy that kills
Ferdinand Mount
Not so long ago, it seemed that every senior civil servant was 'intensely able' or 'deceptively brilliant'. On surfacing into the limelight, each newly promoted permanent Under-Secretary found himself blinking into a blaze of sycophancy. He was no longer dull but 'quiet-spoken', no longer brusque and ill-mannered but 'incisive' or 'abrasive', no longer pedantic but 'gifted with a dazzling grasp of detail'. How quaint and dated this adulation of the upper bureaucracy now seems. In the political sense at least, in the words of Sir John Betjeman (an inveterate foe of Treasury knights): The first-class brains of a senior civil servant Are sweetbread on the road today.'
The criticisms of the Civil Service made by the 'Commons Expenditure Committee merely reflect the hardening of a new conventional wisdom — a distrust and dislike of Whitehall which are nearly as irrational as their opposite. There has always been a feeling against the Civil Service among backbenchers and officials of all parties. The bureaucracy has traditionally been regarded as hostile to innovation and experiment, adept at frustrating or watering down long-laid party plans and sodden with a defeatism which is not a little to blame for Britain's present plight. All these accusations, and more, are to be found in the Expenditure Committee's report.
The report is valuable less for its conclusions, which are mostly banal, than for the pageant, both instructive and comic, whith it offers of thefallenlWhitehall heroes of the decade — Lord Fulton and Lord Crowther-Hunt, Sir John Hunt and Sir Kenneth Berrill, and most notable of all, Sir William Armstrong, Lord Armstrong of Sanderstead, the legendarily able son of the Salvation Army. What a gathering of firstclass minds is there, what a concatenation of honed intellect. The scene demands one of those large canvases commissioned by Victorian magnates — the Crowther Hunt Breakfast — as a souvenir of an extraordinary period in British political history.
The exact nature of this period is still, I think, misunderstood. The unprecedented prominence of senior civil servants over the past ten years leads us to attribute to them an equal power. In fact their monuments have only rarely survived them. Whatever became of the Fulton report on the civil service (see Lord Armstrong's evidence to the Expenditure Committee, pp 656-7, for a diverting account of how the Civil Service buried Fulton while continuing to praise him)? Publication of the Crossman Diaries has demolished Sir John Hunt's doctrine of Cabinet confidentiality. How much can we expect to see survive of the naive and shallow report from Berrill's Think Tank on Overseas Representation? And where, oh where, are the columns of that great tripartite temple that Sir William Armstrong, as head of the Civil Service, laboured so long and diligently with his master to construct? The moment in October 1973 when Ted Heath beckoned a reluctant Armstrong to Sit on the platform between him and Tony Barber as co-author of Phase Three at that celebrated television spectacular in Lancaster House represents the public apotheosis of the senior civil servant. Now nothing remains of the whole portentious edifice — except a sad sour little interview that Armstrong gave to the Observer last Sunday blaming the politicians alternatively for failing to make up their minds (Dick Crossman) and for going on the doctrinal rampage (Tony Benn). The Civil Service did not fall into this excessive prominence. It was pushed. And there can be no doubt that the only person with the necessary propulsive power was the Prime Minister. Nothing in all the Expenditure Committee's report is more memorable than the evidence given, seriatim, by Mr Heath and Sir Harold Wilson. To read their combined forty pages is to understand some small part of the reasons for our misgovernment over the past decade. Mr Heath and Sir Harold differ so vividly in manner and speech that it takes their juxtaposition in the Blue Book to bring home one important and underlying obsession that they share: the obsession with the machinery of government. Which if any of the functions of the Civil Service Department should be remitted to the Treasury, whether the fiscal and economic responsibilities of the Treasury should be split, the correct use of the Central Policy Review Staff, should Transport be part of the Environment or Children part of the Home Office or Health part of Social Security? These are the questions which set both ex-PMs' blood racing, the details of which are effortlessly recalled years later, and the pros and cons of which are debated with a cogency and intellectual enthusiasm altogether lacking from their public utterances on, say, inflation or immigration.
Ted Heath and Harold Wilson are the only two modern Prime Ministers who chose to be civil servants as young men (although, in Mr Heath's case, the engagement was brief). They have taken with them into politics a certain cast of mind which has never ceased to operate, although overlaid by other more eye-catching characteristics: Mr Heath's aggression and determination, Sir Harold's wit and now somewhat dogeared charm. The trouble is not that civil servants have seized excessive power but that we have been governed by civil servants in politicians' clothing, men whose natural inclination is to draw the bureaucracy more intimately into their decisionmaking and to resoft more readily to bureaucratic solutions. The Heath-Wilson years were characterised by a love of reorganising ministerial responsibilities and a gluttony for committees, working parties and Royal Commissions and, as a corollary, by a flight from the real world and from the painful but straightforward remedies that the real world offers.
This style of government depresses public, morale in two ways. Not only does it delay or emasculate necessary real measures; it also makes it appear that government is even more difficult than it is. These committees sit all day and night and produce no solution. Instead, they tend to present a succession of artificial deadlocks. And when on occasion some agreed communique is at length produced, it presents instead of answers only a succession of 'targets', 'strategies' and/or 'options' in a kind of metaphysical language which baffles the uninstructed. 'The tripartite discussions', 'the social contract,' the industrial strategy' — these are merely formulae for obfuscation, affording delight only to the scholiasts of Whitehall whose activities sound like those esoteric recreations people put in Who's Who — Identifying Bottlenecks, Bridging Manpower Gaps.
But merely to mention these phantasms is also to recognise how much of their power over us has now melted away. For the miners and the IMF have between them destroyed the illusive rule of the bureaucrats. They have shown that politics is at once a more brutal and less difficult art than the Civil Service is occupationally inclined to believe. The notion that the British are 'ungovernable' — popularised by a High Court judge, the late Lord Radcliffe — is a selfserving bureaucratic fantasy, for the British can be made ungovernable only by removing the processes of negotiation and decision from people and parliament to the recesses of governmental committee. The supposed remedy for this mythical ungovernability is in fact its cause.
When politicians fix things in smokefilled hotel rooms, they are dealing with real men and real forces and interests. The fix, even if ignoble or short-sighted, is at least anchored in reality. But when civil servants do the fixing, they incline always towards the rigid, the uniform and the consistent — all of which are desirable for framing an administrative rule, but which soon tend to make the most docile people ungovernable. Ie Ferdinand Mount will write the political commentary from this week. John Grigg will continue to write regularly for the Spectator.
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