Last April, I found myself in Azerbaijan, at the third global Baku forum on shared societies - an event stuffed with former prime ministers and presidents from around the world. and I was duly awed, until one of the other journalists at the grand dinner pointedly reminded me of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. Nothing could, indeed be clearer, as we surveyed the men (there were very few women) who had, collectively, overseen events such as the banking crash in Ireland, conflict in Ukraine, the collapse of the Greek economy, and so on.
That event came to mind on Monday evening, when Margaret Hodge, senior Labour MP and former chair of the Commons public accounts committee, and Nick Macpherson, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, were at King’s College’s Policy Institute together to plug Hodge’s new book, Called to Account, about her time on the committee.
Not, of course, that Hodge’s career has ended in failure. It is very far from ending and her time as PAC chair was certainly a huge success. Macpherson, too, who left Whitehall this year, was garlanded in roses as he left the civil service.
But there was a tinge of irony about the two of them standing side by side and agreeing that something must be done to overhaul Whitehall. For one thing, it’s only three months since Hodge professed herself “shocked” at Macpherson’s post-Whitehall role as part-time chair of family-run bank C Hoare & Co, which offers to find clients “the best after-tax returns” as part of its offshore investment management wing. And Macpherson himself, an old Etonian, acknowledged the irony of criticising “the mandarins’ guild” of which he was until recently a long-term member.
But the truth is that, as David Cameron has also recently found, once politicians or senior civil servants leave powerful positions, the baton has to be handed on. Hodge and Macpherson can call until they are blue in the face for the civil service to be reformed, but it now rests with Theresa May’s ministers to push that through.
And it’s funny how people change their attitudes. In post, Macpherson was distinctly lukewarm about the Treasury being the “corporate centre” of Whitehall and about the appointment of former BP executive John Manzoni as the first-ever chief executive of the civil service. Now, it seems, the scales have fallen from his eyes and he sees Manzoni, who has tried hard to bring in more commercial expertise to Whitehall, as the only way to force through change.
But no matter now much Macpherson or Hodge now believe in the need for civil servants to be able to let and manage contracts, to stop millions being poured into private companies that could be better spent on much-needed support for poorer people, the baton has been handed over. It’s time for the present crop of civil servants and politicians in No 10, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office to see what they can do.
At entry level, or, at least, graduate intake level, which is where the cadre of the next generation of mandarins will eventually come from, the civil service is trying to change, to make its fast stream entrants more diverse, including more class diversity. But the responses from Guardian readers to the process as it stands makes it clear that the scheme still has a long way to go before it truly does bring in a more diverse set of future leaders.
On Monday, Hodge pointed out that the accountability system for the civil service might have been suitable after the first world war, when there were 280 members of staff in the Home Office. Today, not so much. But finding avid reformers and achieving reform, at a time when the civil service has to manage Brexit? Don’t hold your breath.
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