‘Blair doesn’t trust anyone”, Bender silently concluded.’ That’s a quote from the venomous book about the former prime minister by Tom Bower: Broken Vows: Tony Blair, The Tragedy of Power. Sir Brian Bender, who retired from Whitehall seven years ago, was second permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office for six years up to 2000, and is just one among many civil service sources of disobliging remarks about both Blair and Labour ministers.
Bower says he had conversations with “dozens of junior and senior officials, permanent secretaries and all the cabinet secretaries”. And they all bitched, not just about Blair, but his wife and his advisers. The cabinet secretaries, especially Lords Butler, Wilson and Turnbull, appear to have been especially acerbic – (and, according to Bower) disobliging about one another as well.
Bower says “a handful refused to speak to me”. But they rather than their garrulous colleagues were upholding one of British public service’s main conventions, which used to apply in local and devolved government as well as the civil service. It says you don’t diss your politicians, certainly not in public. You certainly don’t allow an author with a transparently destructive agenda to write as if privy to your innermost thoughts – and certainly not one whose contempt for public service is exceeded only by his hatred of the Labour government.
Silence has its rationale. One is trust, a necessary lubricant of good government. Did the lordly cabinet secretaries, in spilling the beans, not consider whether they were damaging their successors’ ability to make the machine work? No 10 must surely now be wondering what cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood is noting in his diary to regurgitate to Cameron’s biographer. Reading Sir Michael Scholar’s criticisms of ministers (he was permanent secretary at the Department for Trade and Industry) George Osborne will surely ask about the discretion of Tom Scholar, his son, newly appointed permanent secretary at the Treasury.
Public servants are accorded power. Ministers and council leaders come and go; permanent secretaries and chief executives (generally) outlast them. Yet give or take the occasional parliamentary hearing and scrutiny committee, they are unaccountable for much of their work, the advice they give and the decisions they take in the politicians’ names. The price they pay – according to the rules of the game – is a kind of omertà. They collect reasonable pensions, gongs and honours and depart the scene, carrying the secrets of the private office (and their views about their ministers) to the grave.
That is still how it works in local authorities. The professional code says: in running public business, we must protect that vital but delicate link between democracy (the elected politician) and public management. However badly politicians behave, chief executives usually respect the convention so as to secure the mechanism for future use.
Sir Maurice Stonefrost, chief executive of the Greater London Council until its abolition in 1986, would never have dreamed of blabbing about the foibles of Ken Livingstone, its leader; similarly Sir Rodney Brooke, chief executive of Westminster under Shirley Porter. To them and their successors, the ethic of public service is best served by depersonalisation. Is that old-fashioned? Surely the civil servants who poured their hearts out to Bower are more in tune with the self-proclaimed age of transparency?
The old way was asymmetrical. Politicians could enjoy the limelight, while making disparaging remarks about public service – sometimes their press secretaries would insinuate criticism of individual officials. The saintly Iain Duncan Smith tried to foist blame for the failure of universal credit on the work and pensions permanent secretary Robert Devereux. While he was at the education department, Michael Gove allowed his special advisers to rubbish civil servants.
But if moving to symmetry means civil servants answering back and giving as good as they get, constitutional questions open up. Throughout the public sector, managers are held accountable for meeting targets. But the higher up you go, the more amorphous performance frameworks become. The targets for permanent secretaries, as for council chief executives, are often nominal.
If these senior public servants start adopting views and taking public postures, like Bower’s witnesses, their accountability becomes a major problem. How they are appointed and how their performance is managed would have to be subject to public inspection and appraisal. But by whom? At the moment representative democracy – MPs and councillors – hardly looks fit for the task in the light of public dissatisfaction with parliaments and town halls and growing contempt for those inhabiting them.
