civitas the return of political patronage · the return of political patronage how special advisers...

Jonathan Lindsell

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N o-one in power has announced it. No-one in power has even admitted

it. But the actions of successive governments have been to downgrade

and marginalise objective civil service advice, and to replace it with

counsel from politically committed special advisers.’

The special adviser – or ‘spad’ – has become firmly established in Westminster

folklore over the past two decades, coming to symbolise much that is questionable

about modern politics. The likes of Jo Moore, who urged colleagues to use 9/11

to bury bad news, and Damian McBride, who schemed on behalf of Gordon

Brown against members of his own cabinet, have lent the Whitehall caricatures

of the television comedy The Thick of It more than a veneer of credibility.

But the implications for government of this growing cadre of politically-motivated

apparatchiks are no joke, extending well beyond the chicanery of a few high-

profile figures. In this excoriating account of contemporary government, Alasdair

Palmer – who has worked up close with spads in the Home Office and spent

years documenting Whitehall machinations as a journalist – portrays the return

of political patronage to the highest levels of our public administration.

It is a phenomenon that the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the mid-19th century

were meant to banish, and one which now threatens Britain’s rare and precious

heritage of relatively efficient, relatively uncorrupt government.

‘The practice of good government in Britain has not been lost – yet. But it is

changing, and in ways which could eventually lead to the disappearance of

impartial scrutiny of government policy by civil service officials.’

Alasd

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Alasdair Palmer

CIVITAS

How special advisers are taking over from civilservants and why we need to worry about it

The Return of Political Patronage


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How special advisers are taking over from civil

servants and why we need to worry about it

Alasdair Palmer

CIVITAS

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First Published November 2015

© Civitas 201555 Tufton Street

London SW1P 3QL

email: [email protected]

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-906837-73-0

Independence: Civitas: Institute for the Study of CivilSociety is a registered educational charity (No. 1085494)and a company limited by guarantee (No. 04023541).Civitas is financed from a variety of private sources to avoid over-reliance on any single or small group of donors.

All publications are independently refereed. All theInstitute’s publications seek to further its objective ofpromoting the advancement of learning. The viewsexpressed are those of the authors, not of the Institute,as is responsibility for data and content.

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Contents

Author vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: No Sir Humphrey 1

1. Impartiality, objectivity, honesty and integrity 6

2. ‘This is shit’: The marginalisation of civil servants 18

3. The new Machiavellis and the job of the court 40

4. The patronage virus and incompetent government 57

Conclusion: Keeping our government straight 72

Bibliography 80

Notes 83

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Author

Alasdair Palmer was born in London and read historyand philosophy at Cambridge. He has worked forGranada Television (now ITV), The Spectator and TheSunday Telegraph, where he won the Charles DouglasHome Prize for Journalism in 2002. He has been acreative consultant for HBO in Los Angeles and spent18 months at the Home Office as a civil servant,observing the relationship between ministers, specialadvisers and civil servants while writing speeches forTheresa May. He currently is writing a television dramaseries about human rights with Peter Berry. He ismarried with two children.

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vii

Acknowledgements

A number of people read and made helpful comments on this report prior to its publication. The author wouldparticularly like to thank Daniel Bentley, Simon Berthon,Amy Erickson, Peter Hennessy, Peter Morris, Brian Palmer,Alan Petty, Mark Thompson, Jonathan Sumption, DanielWolf and David Wood. He would also like to thankDavid Green for commissioning the report, and for his consistent encouragement.

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Introduction

No Sir Humphrey

The procedures of government do not receive thediscussion they deserve. They are critically important.They make the difference between effective governmentand government that is oppressive and corrupt. Butthey do not seem to interest the electorate, or at least theportion of it that influences what is on television and inthe newspapers – and as a consequence, procedures ofgovernment are rarely the focus of attention.

Yet there is an increasing consensus amongsthistorians, political scientists and even economists thatthe most important step for achieving and maintaininga free and prosperous society is getting administrativeprocedures right: ensuring that they are cost-effectiveand run by politicians and officials who do not viewpublic office as a means to making as much money aspossible for themselves and their supporters.1

Historically, uncorrupt and efficient government hasbeen rare. It is still rare in most of the world today.Politicians and officials in many countries see politicalpower as giving them a great advantage which they canand should use for their own personal benefit. Britain’sheritage of relatively uncorrupt government, withofficials who see it as their role to ensure that ‘ministersof any persuasion will not be able to use the machineryof the state to personal or party political advantage’,2 isas remarkable as it is precious.

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That heritage is largely the result of the reformsinspired by the 1854 report from civil servants SirStafford Northcote and Charles Trevelyan. Theirproposals were, for the time, revolutionary: theyadvocated ending the time-honoured tradition thatgovernment employment should be based on nepotismand jobbery. They identified political patronage as asure way of generating incompetent government. Theythought most of the problems with the way Britain wasgoverned derived from the fact that its officials wereappointed not because they were the best person for thejob, but because they were a friend or relative ofsomeone in political power. As a result, governmentbureaucracy was staffed by what the Northcote-Trevelyan Report described as ‘the unambitious, theindolent or the incapable’.

To ensure that the right people were given posts ingovernment – people, that is, who were capable ofperforming the tasks effectively and efficiently, and whowould not be corrupt – it was essential to take theappointments process out of the hands of politicians,and give it to a politically independent organisation thatwould offer government posts to individuals solely onthe basis of an assessment of their being the mostcapable candidate available. That is why they thoughtthat meritocratic appointments required that those incharge of making them should be committed to thevalues of objectivity and impartiality. If the peopledoing the appointing were tied to any particularpolitical party, then party considerations wouldinevitably end up determining appointments. And thatwould ensure that the wrong people were appointed,which in turn would produce inefficient, and probablycorrupt, government.

THE RETuRN OF POLITICAL PATRONAGE

2


To replace this system, they recommended the creationof a civil service free of all taint of political patronage,whose members were selected wholly on the basis ofmerit, and who would be trained to reflect the values ofimpartiality and objectivity which Northcote andTrevelyan thought were necessary for the preparation andselection of rational and effective government policies.

Practices deriving from Northcote’s and Trevelyan’sreforms have characterised the British civil service forwell over a century. But they are not self-sustaining:they require commitment, care and attention frompoliticians and officials if they are to be carried on. Wecould easily do things differently, with much lessemphasis on the political independence of the civilservice, and with far less use for its objective andimpartial scrutiny of political policies. In the unitedStates, many thousands of officials are changedwhenever a presidential election produces a presidentfrom a different party. The system of politicalappointments is known as ‘the spoils system’, afterPresident Jackson, who was elected in 1829 and wantedto replace the existing officials with ones that werepolitically sympathetic to him: he justified his action bysaying bluntly ‘to the victor, the spoils’. Nearly 150years later, President Eisenhower cemented thatapproach to government office when he issued anexecutive order ensuring that only his politicalsupporters could be employed in positions thatinvolved providing policy advice or readingconfidential documents.3 We could follow the samemodel here. But very few people with experience ofboth systems think that it would be an improvement.

My contention in this pamphlet is that we are movingslowly but surely in that direction, and in a typically

INTRODuCTION: NO SIR HuMPHREY

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British fashion. No-one in power has announced it. No-one in power has even admitted it. The political rhetoricfrom ministers of all three main parties has been toinsist that the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement is beingpreserved, that they value and want to keep the benefitsof policy advice that can only come from independentand impartial officials. But the actions of successivegovernments since 1997 have in fact been to downgradeand marginalise objective and impartial civil serviceadvice, and to replace it with counsel from politicallycommitted special advisers.

Because the rhetoric is so different from the reality, it isnot easy to work out exactly what is going on. Manyacademic commentators seem to me to have been misledby the statements and regulations in favour of impartialand objective advice provided by permanent officials intothinking that the statements on paper represent the reality.In the testimony given to the numerous parliamentaryselect committees that have written reports on the civilservice over the last 15 years, and in the books andpamphlets that have been written by special advisersthemselves, it is possible to unearth evidence thatsomething very different has been happening.

I also had the experience of seeing something of theway government now works at first hand when I wasemployed as a civil servant to write speeches forTheresa May at the Home Office. I expected the HomeOffice to be a version of Yes Minister, the television showthat, thirty years ago, so effectively portrayed wily,omniscient civil servants manipulating dim politicians.It was not in the least like that: however accurate itmight have been when it was first broadcast, YesMinister is a completely misleading portrayal of howgovernment works today. Far from being manipulated


4


by senior civil servants, the secretary of state and her special advisers had an enormously powerfulinfluence on the department. Advice from impartial andobjective civil servants was much less important than straightforwardly political counsel from theunquestionably extremely able special advisers.

Did what seemed to be the marginalisation of civil service advice mean that worse decisions werebeing taken? That is obviously the critical issue.unfortunately, I was not in a position to make ajudgement on it. All that I can say with any confidenceis that the process of diminishing the role of objective,impartial scrutiny of policy proposals was well underway. That is not necessarily a harbinger of a precipitousdecline in administrative standards. But there is aserious risk that it could be. Lord (Peter) Hennessy oncecorrectly observed that good government is ‘like a cleanwater supply – you take no notice of it until it iscontaminated, by which time it is too late’.4 The practiceof good government in Britain has not been lost – yet.But it is changing, and in ways which could eventuallylead to the disappearance of objective and impartialscrutiny of government policy by civil service officialsprior to that policy being implemented. We need akeener awareness that we could be in danger of losingit, because without one, we could soon wake up to findthat it is gone.5

INTRODuCTION: NO SIR HuMPHREY

5


1

Impartiality, objectivity,honesty and integrity

Every minister who speaks publicly about the civilservice praises its values of impartiality, objectivity,honesty and integrity. Although they may think the civilservice needs reform, they rarely openly proclaim thatits faults are related to its commitment to those values.It is almost universally recognised that impartiality,objectivity, honesty and integrity are essential qualitiesof good government officials. Those values are, alongwith the selection of officials on the basis of merit alone,regarded as the bedrock of an effective civil service.

The essential characteristic of special advisers is thatthey are not committed to impartiality and objectivity:that, and the fact that they are not selected on meritalone, is what distinguishes them from the permanentofficials of the civil service.

So why do many ministers – and many commentators,academic and otherwise – think that effectivegovernment is now impossible without specialadvisers?1 Ministers stress that they need advice andhelp from people who are emphatically not impartialand objective. They believe they need advisers whosepriority is to get the party manifesto that won theelection implemented. Objective and impartial officials

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are not as good at this as politically partisan adviserswho have been selected because ministers know theycan rely on them to support their political programme.

Why would ministers believe that objectivity andimpartiality constitute a bar, or at least a handicap, tothe effective implementation of party policies? Do theythink that their own policies cannot stand up toimpartial and objective scrutiny, and if they receive toomuch of it, serious faults and inadequacies will beexposed? That is surely not the reason why ministersthink they need to go outside the civil service for advice.Ministers’ conviction that they need politically engagedadvisers rather springs from a generalised distrust ofWhitehall officials, and of their claims to assess policiesimpartially and objectively.

That distrust cuts across both main political parties.underlying it is the conviction that political policiescannot be effectively implemented by politically neutral– that is impartial – officials. Many politicians have thesense that the much-vaunted impartiality of the civilservice is a myth. Civil servants inevitably have theirown views on what should be done, and whatever thoseviews are, sooner or later they are bound to conflict withwhat the elected government has a mandate to do. Fewcritics of civil service impartiality would be as blunt asCharles Clarke, who, in the course of a discussion aboutthe civil service’s values of objectivity and impartiality,stated: ‘I do not fit the description of “totally objective”to anything. I do not believe such a thing exists. I thinkit is a nonsensical concept.’2

But many would agree that civil servants’ commitmentto impartiality and objectivity can get in the way of theirimplementing government policy effectively. FrancisMaude, who was the Coalition’s Cabinet Office minister,

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IMPARTIALITY, OBJECTIVITY, HONESTY AND INTEGRITY


and in charge of civil service reform, has even gone sofar as to suggest that it may be time to diminish the civilservice’s commitment to impartiality, objectivity,honesty and integrity. While recognising that thosevalues are ‘really important’, Maude also stressed thatthey are ‘static, passive values. And two are essentiallymirrors of the others’. He described the ‘great virtues’ as‘pace, professionalism, passion, pride’, adding that‘they’re warm, dynamic, human’ – as opposed,presumably, to the cold and inhuman values ofimpartiality, objectivity, integrity and honesty.3

Even Oliver Letwin, minister for government policyunder the Coalition, who is in many ways a defender ofthe traditional values of the civil service, indicated deepanxiety about permanent officials’ lack of enthusiasmfor policies that ministers have a mandate from theelectorate to implement. In a speech on civil servicereform, Letwin asserted: ‘Administrative civil servantscan, at their worst, defeat ministerial objectives just byensuring that when the minister has decided to act,nothing actually happens. Such failures of transmissionare the enemies of democracy – and one of the thingsthat our civil service reform programme is designed todo is to eliminate such failures.’4

In 1959, perhaps the high-water mark of respect forthe British civil service, C.H. Sisson wrote in The Spiritof British Administration:

The argument for taking more political control ofthe civil service is that permanent officials cannotbe trusted to share the enthusiasm of politicians,and that they will be less effective advisers andexecutants than men who share the ministers’political convictions and ambitions.


8


Sisson, who spent 30 years as a civil servant, andwhose book is a paean of praise to the British civilservice, dismissed that argument as ‘rarely held by thepolitician who has experience of office’.5 Perhaps thatwas true in 1959. It is certainly not true in 2015. ButSisson accurately sums up the politician’s case forspecial advisers: the effective implementation of anypolitically controversial policy requires not objectivityand impartiality, but political commitment. Manyministers have stressed this point – for example Lord(Andrew) Adonis, who was a special adviser to TonyBlair before he was appointed education minister, thentransport secretary. Lord Adonis insisted to the PublicAdministration Committee that the trouble withpermanent civil servants is that ‘there is not this intensepassion [for the elected government’s policies] thatthere needs to be’.6

Special advisers were first introduced as acounterweight to what was perceived as the civilservice’s lack of enthusiasm and commitment by HaroldWilson in 1964.7 The economist Nicholas Kaldor was oneof two outside experts (the other was the economistThomas Balogh) who were hired by Wilson’sadministration. Their purpose, in Kaldor’s words, was‘to conduct Labour ministers’ battles with the civilservice... [because] the civil service gradually developsits own set of views and is an autonomous body, whichon the whole is naturally conservative’. Balogh had alsoclaimed in The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, a highly criticallook at the condition of the civil service, that officialsconspired to enforce an orthodox economic policyagenda on ministers, with the result that Labour’ssocialist economic platform was inevitably frustratedwhen it was left to civil servants to implement it.8

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The 1964 Labour government’s experiment withspecial advisers was not an unqualified success. Kaldorand Balogh felt they were under-used. Harold Wilson(who had himself been a civil servant during the war)retained a belief that relying on ‘loyal civil servants’produced better results than replacing them withoutsiders. But Wilson’s use of special advisers as a wayof getting around what was perceived as the reluctance,or the inability, of permanent officials to implement thepolicies of the elected government was a harbinger ofthings to come. It began a trend which, over time, hasgathered great force. After Labour won the election heldon 28 February 1974, Wilson increased the number ofspecial advisers to 30. Each cabinet minister wasauthorised to employ a maximum of two. Wilsonhimself set up his own policy unit of seven people with,as he put it, ‘expert knowledge in the fields of economic,industrial and social policy... The policy unit was set up,and its members selected, to provide a team with strongpolitical commitment to… further the government’spolitical goals’.9

In 1964 Wilson’s special advisers were experts in theirfield of economics: both Kaldor and Balogh hadconsiderable academic reputations. But over the next 50years, special advisers have come to be younger and lessexpert, often being hired in their twenties within a fewyears of graduation. The idea that enthusiasm andcommitment are more important qualities in an adviserthan expertise seems to have originated with GeorgeLansbury, Labour’s leader after Ramsay MacDonaldbecame head of the National government in 1931.Lansbury argued that if Labour were elected, it wouldneed to place people at the top of all governmentdepartments who accepted Labour’s social and


10


economic policies and were wholeheartedly determinedto make them successful. He thought the politicalcommitment of those appointed was going to be muchmore important than their administrative skills: it wastheir beliefs rather than their knowledge that mattered.10

Clement Attlee, the Labour leader swept to power inthe election of July 1945, took a more benign view of thecivil service, and was more willing to appreciate thevalue of its expertise. But to judge by the age andqualifications of those who have been selected as specialadvisers over the past two decades, both major partieshave come to share Lansbury’s judgement that politicalcommitment is more important than administrativeexperience. The median age of special advisers declinedfrom 36 under John Major’s administration to 31 underthe Coalition. The number of advisers appointedbecause they have expert knowledge of a technicalsubject such as arms control has also diminished.11 Thetendency, as Lord Hennessy has stressed, has been toemploy people as special advisers because of what theybelieve, rather than because of what they know.

Why? Why has political commitment been preferredto proven expertise? That choice makes perfect sense ifthe problem needing solution is regarded as theimpartiality and objectivity of officials: theirprofessional lack of political commitment is necessaryfor them to be able to provide continuity, and to servewhichever government is elected; but it may make themprofessionally unable to implement a new electedgovernment’s priorities with the enthusiasm andalacrity that a new minister taking control of adepartment would wish. Expertise is not something inshort supply in Whitehall, and if officials themselves arenot expert in a particular field, it is not difficult for them

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to get access to people who are. What officials lack, andare supposed to lack, is political commitment. FrancisMaude, when he was Cabinet Office minister andpaymaster general, insisted:

The principal benefit of special advisers, certainlyfor me and for other ministers I think, is to havehighly intelligent people about whom there cannever be any suggestion of divided loyalties. Thatis really important.12

Note the assumption inherent in Maude’s statement:officials are likely to have divided loyalties – they arenot going to be wholly dedicated to the politicalpriorities of the elected government in the way thatspecial advisers, chosen at least partly for their politicalcommitment, will be. Maude added that one of thecritical roles of special advisers was ‘to ensure that thedecisions that have been taken [by the minister] areactually implemented in the way that was intended’. Hewas very clear: ‘I do not think that the best use for aspecial adviser is to provide subject expertise.’

An indication of just how worried ministers havebecome by what they perceive to be officials’ lack ofengagement in the elected government’s priorities is thealmost hysterical reaction to the discovery of a civilservice document which specified the qualities neededto fill the job of permanent secretary. It was written in2009, but Francis Maude didn’t see it until July 2014. Hewas shocked to discover that the document, entitled‘Indicators of Potential for Permanent Secretary Roles’,had a sentence stating that a permanent secretaryshould be able to ‘balance ministers’ or high levelstakeholders’ immediate needs or priorities with thelong-term aims of their department’. The document also


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stated that suitable candidates should be able to copewith ‘often irrational demands’.

Maude said that the document ‘does not conform toconstitutional propriety’, on the grounds that hethought that it implied that officials are not obliged tofollow government policy. Nick Herbert, who had beena minister at the Ministry of Justice, opined that it wasan ‘extraordinary document’:

This is actually beyond a joke. We can’t have a kindof permanent government of an unelectedbureaucracy deciding that it has its own long-termpriorities which may be different to those ofministers and the elected government.13

But of course, that is not what the document asserts orimplies. And furthermore, the civil service does inevitably,and uncontroversially, have its own long-term prioritieswhich may be different to those of ministers and theelected government. For instance: the civil service isresponsible for maintaining continuity, and ensuring thatgovernment can continue in an uninterrupted fashionbetween administrations and during periods oftransition. Although, as citizens, ministers probably havean interest in seeing that the civil service performs thatfunction, as party politicians, they may not do so. At anyevent, it is unlikely to be high on their list of priorities.But it is and ought to be high on the list of any permanentsecretary’s. And if a minister’s priorities were to involvedismantling his or her department’s ability to continueto function over the long term, then quite rightly it wouldbe a permanent secretary’s job to ‘balance’ thoseministerial demands against the long-term interests ofthe department in maintaining a continued ability toperform its role effectively.

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That Maude and Herbert see a Whitehall conspiracyto frustrate the aims of the elected government in abland statement of what is indisputably part of apermanent secretary’s job indicates the extent to whichthe civil service has lost the trust of many electedpoliticians. Civil servants can and no doubt do frustrateministers by their failure to implement their ministers’preferred policies fast enough or even at all. But this document cannot be accurately interpreted asencouraging that kind of behaviour.

The political engagement of special advisers is notonly advocated as a way of combatting the professionalscepticism, and occasionally what is perceived as thehostility, or even just the plain indolence, of officialstowards the effective implementation of the politicalpolicies of the elected government. Perhaps becausethey are aware that criticising the civil service for toogreat a commitment to impartiality and objectivity isnot good politics (no-one, or almost no-one, comes outagainst impartiality and objectivity when discussingwhat virtues it is rational to want permanent officials toexhibit), ministers have come up with anotherexplanation for why they need special advisers. Farfrom undermining the values of objectivity andimpartiality, they maintain, special advisers are the bestway of protecting the civil service’s commitment to them.

Ministers are obviously politicians as well asadministrators in charge of departments. They haveparty political tasks they have to perform: for instance,convincing members of their own party that the policiesthey are following are consistent with the political idealsof the party they represent. Special advisers are engagedto perform the political tasks that a minister needs done,


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or needs advice and help with, so that permanentofficials do not have to be implicated in that process,and can therefore remain objective and impartial. Thisis stated explicitly in the first paragraph of the 2010Code of Conduct for Special Advisers:

The employment of special advisers adds a politicaldimension to the advice and assistance available toministers, while reinforcing the political impartialityof the permanent civil service by distinguishing thesource of political advice and support.

The second paragraph states:

Special advisers are employed to help ministers onmatters where the work of the government and thework of the government party overlap, and whereit would be inappropriate for permanent civilservants to become involved.

The underlying logic of that claim is perfectly sound:politically motivated special advisers, chosen becauseof their political commitments, will, by performingpolitically sensitive or partisan tasks, protect the civilservice from entanglement in party political issues.Permanent officials do not have to compromise theirobjectivity and impartiality: issues which requirepolitical commitment are handled by the minister’s ownpolitical appointees. Put like that, it sounds a whollybenign process, and one that is beneficial to allconcerned, including the citizens of this country –which may be why a large number of senior civilservants accept it.

The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to locate theline that separates the tasks for which politicalcommitment is required. Any individual chosen for

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ministerial office is selected as the representative of apolitical party. The policies they are expected toimplement derive in large part from the politicalprogramme of the political party that won the lastelection. Elected politicians’ recurrent complaint aboutthe civil service usually amounts to the allegation thatbecause civil service officials do not share their (theelected government’s) political commitments, they donot, and perhaps cannot, implement its policies with thealacrity and effectiveness that is required.

That argument is distorted when made into an all-or-nothing proposition. It would not be true to claim thatmost politicians want immediately to replace all of thesenior civil service with a group of officials appointedwholly on grounds of their political allegiance. It wouldalso be false to claim that there is no role for adviserswhose role is explicitly political, and who perform rolesthat civil servants should not – such as, for example,liaising between the minister and his party, or briefingjournalists on the politics of the minister’s policies, oradvising on suitable material for a speech at the annualparty conference.

The question is rather one of degree. Politicians cansee the benefits of a permanent civil service, committedto the objective and impartial assessment of policies:they certainly say they can see those benefits oftenenough. But they also have a keen sense of its costs.Given that elected politicians perceive a conflictbetween getting the policies they have been elected toput into practice implemented quickly and effectivelyand having those policies evaluated, criticised and thenimplemented by officials committed to impartiality andobjectivity, the issue is the balance between the twogoals. How much of the department’s policy business


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is best handled by people who are politically committedrather than by those who are professionally impartialand objective?

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2

‘This is shit’: The marginalisation

of civil servants

If ministers think that most policy business, whether it is advice or implementation, needs politicallycommitted people if it is to be done effectively, then theconsequence of insulating civil service officials frompolitical tasks will inevitably be to marginalise theirrole.1 That is precisely what Sir Robin Mountfield, whowas permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office for fiveyears from 1995 to 1999, thought he had observedhappening. In 2002 he wrote: ‘My own view is that thegreatest threat the special advisers in their present formpose to the civil service is not the politicisation of civilservants, but their marginalisation in the adviceprocess.’2 Lord (Andrew) Turnbull, who was cabinetsecretary and head of the civil service from 2002 to 2005,said in 2008:

More [civil service work] goes through theminister’s special adviser channel than used to bethe case. I think ministers still respect the politicalneutrality of the civil service, but they do not use itto the extent that they used to, or that they should. 3

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Sir Richard Mottram, who was permanent secretary ata number of different departments, including theMinistry of Defence and the Cabinet Office, madebasically the same point when he insisted that, ratherthan ministers ‘actively seeking to undermine thepolitical impartiality of the civil service’, what ‘has beenhappening… is that ministers give relatively less weightto the contribution of the civil service in the formulationof policy and in advising generally.’ He added: ‘Therehas been a developing trend towards giving moreweight to the role of special advisers, and that hasspeeded up.’ He felt that a pressing question formembers of both Houses of Parliament was how farthey ‘wish that trend to continue’.4

Is it correct to maintain that special advisers aregradually taking over the civil service’s role inproviding policy advice to ministers? The answer to thatquestion is of considerable importance. Moving from asituation in which policies are primarily assessed byofficials committed to impartiality and objectivitybefore they are implemented, and are amended on thebasis of that assessment, to one where the primaryassessment is done by politically engaged individuals,would be a very significant change in the way thiscountry is governed. It is not obvious that it is a changethat we as citizens and taxpayers want to happen. Andif it is happening, it is happening without discussion orconsultation: you will not find a commitment todiminish the role of impartial and objective civil serviceadvice on policy in any party manifesto.

So how much influence on policy-making do specialadvisers have? There is one bad argument to the effectthat they have very little. The argument is essentiallybased on numbers: the number of special advisers is

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‘THIS IS SHIT’: THE MARGINALISATION OF CIVIL SERVANTS


small while the number of civil servants is huge –therefore, special advisers cannot have much influence.When he was prime minister, Tony Blair made this pointto the Commons Liaison Committee on 16 July 2002.‘We have 80 special advisers for the whole government’,he said. ‘There are 3,500 senior civil servants… I thinkwe need to get this in context.’5 In 2005, in a debate inthe Lords, Lord (Gus) Macdonald of Tradeston, whofrom 2001 to 2003 was Cabinet Office minister, claimed:

Surely no serious commentator imagines that asmall band of about 80 special advisers – only one,Jonathan Powell, with executive authority – hassomehow become an agency with the power andintent to threaten the integrity and tradition of 3,900senior civil servants.6

Similarly, in their written evidence to the PublicAdministration Select Committee in May 2012, ProfessorsDavid Richards and Martin Smith, together with theformer special adviser Patrick Diamond, insisted:

The notion that Whitehall has been marginalised bythe relative growth of spads [special advisers]… isboth a misrepresentation and a misunderstandingof the role played by spads in the British politicalsystem. Indeed, in terms of numbers and relativeinfluence, there are very few special advisers inrelation to permanent civil servants.7

Even senior civil servants put this argument. Forinstance, Lord (Richard) Wilson, when he gave evidenceto the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC)in 2000 – he was then cabinet secretary – maintained:‘70-odd advisers could not swamp the senior civilservice of 3,700 people.’8


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The problem with the numbers argument is that itrests on a fallacy. It is simply not true to conclude thatif x is smaller in number than y, then x has less influencethan y. Obviously, in any organisation with a commandstructure, from an army or a government to a business,there are a few people at the top, and many people atthe bottom: the many outnumber the few, but the fewat the top have far greater influence on what action theorganisation takes. There is only one prime minister orchief executive or field marshal, but their decisionsdetermine what actions the organisation that they leadwill take, in a way that those of their much morenumerous underlings do not. Having insisted to PASCthat the small number of special advisers precludedthem from having greater influence than civil servantson policy advice, Richard Wilson sent a diagramdepicting how Number 10’s staff was organised whichshowed Jonathan Powell – a special adviser, not a careercivil servant – at its apex. In answer to the question, ‘IsJonathan Powell in charge at Number 10?’, the thencabinet secretary replied: ‘Yes.’9

So the question about the extent of the influence ofspecial advisers cannot be answered just by looking attheir numbers – although in fact these have grownconsistently since 1997. When Tony Blair was electedprime minister, he brought more than 70 specialadvisers with him, doubling the number John Majorhad used, who in turn had more than MargaretThatcher. Every government since Tony Blair resignedin 2007 has promised to reduce the number of specialadvisers. Every government has ended up increasingthem. It is almost certain David Cameron will not endhis second term in office with fewer special advisersthan he had before the 2015 election.

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It is perfectly consistent with there being fewer specialadvisers than senior civil servants that special advisersshould increasingly determine what policy adviceministers receive. Do they in fact do this? It is not easyto get reliable evidence on the matter. Civil servantswho are currently employed, as opposed to retired, arenot usually allowed, under the terms of their contract,to speak publicly about their employment and whatthey see happening in their department. Specialadvisers are bound by the same obligation not todisclose anything whilst in employment. But becausetheir positions are usually temporary, more of themhave written and spoken after leaving the role. Inevidence to parliament’s select committees, they havetended to insist that – as Michael Jacobs, a specialadviser to Gordon Brown from 2004 to 2010, told PASCin 2012 – ‘the idea that in some sense advisers “usurp”or “marginalize” the role of civil servants is mistaken’.10

There are grounds, however, for thinking thatevidence given by former special advisers on this topicto parliamentary committees is not always whollyreliable. For example, Paul Richards, who was a specialadviser to Hazel Blears, told the Lords ConstitutionCommittee: ‘The idea that a spad would tell a civilservant what to do is nonsense. I never experienced thatwith myself or anyone else.’11 It was then pointed out tohim that in 1997, Jonathan Powell and AlastairCampbell, two of Tony Blair’s special advisers, werespecifically given the power to command civil serviceofficials by orders in council. Richards accepted that yes,that had happened.12 But he said it was merely a ‘one-off, a blip if you will’ – although one that, in Powell’scase, lasted for over a decade. His power to commandcivil servants was not rescinded until 2007, when


22


Gordon Brown became prime minister and JonathanPowell left Number 10 with Tony Blair.

In his memoirs of his time as Tony Blair’s chief of staff,Jonathan Powell maintains that the measure formallyconfirming his power to give orders to civil servantswasn’t necessary. Powell is emphatic that it was‘ludicrous… to suggest that we [Powell and Campbell]were doing anything different from what Ed Balls wasdoing in the Treasury as a special adviser to GordonBrown or other special advisers were doing elsewherein Whitehall’.13 That is: all special advisers give ordersto civil servants – so nothing whatever was gained bygiving the two most senior special advisers the formalpower to do this.

In 2002, the Public Administration Select Committeeconducted an inquiry into the ‘Jo Moore affair’.14 JoMoore was the special adviser at the Department ofTransport who sent an email on 11 September 2001,suggesting it was a good day to ‘get out anything wewant to bury: councillors’ expenses?’ She made thesame point five months later, on 14 February 2002, theday of Princess Margaret’s funeral. In the course ofexamining her actions, the committee noted: ‘Ms Mooretook on a series of executive and in effect managerialtasks without reference to the proper procedures.’ It isstriking that no-one in a position to take action seemsto have tried to do anything to stop her taking on‘executive and managerial tasks’– a phrase that servesas a euphemism for giving civil servants orders. It didnot even generate any comment until after she wascaught trying to bury bad news by getting it out on theday of the 9/11 attacks and of Princess Margaret’sfuneral. What was thought outrageous about Jo Moore’sconduct as a special adviser was not that she took on

23



‘executive and… managerial tasks’. It was that she sentthose emails.

This seems to me strong evidence that special advisersunder Blair were indeed doing routinely what JonathanPowell insists that they were: that is, giving commandsto civil servants. Lord (Richard) Wilson, who wascabinet secretary from 1998-2002, denied that thishappened when giving evidence to the Committee onStandards in Public Life in 2002. Sir Malcolm Wicksasked him if special advisers gave ‘instructions’ to civilservants. Lord Wilson replied that he thought ‘directorders are relatively rare’. He maintained the usualsituation was that ‘you have a discussion about it… Ithink that is a much more common situation thansomeone banging the table, as the word ‘instructions’implies, and giving an order.’15

But Lord Wilson would not have been party to thetypical interactions between a special adviser and ajunior or mid-ranking civil servant. It may well havebeen the case that for a civil servant as elevated as thecabinet secretary, who is also head of the whole homecivil service, meetings with special advisers did notinvolve special advisers issuing ‘instructions’. Furtherdown the food chain, however, the relationship betweenspecial advisers and civil servants was unlikely to havebeen quite so collegial.

Civil servants rarely complain publicly about theirconditions of employment: doing so is effectively careersuicide. However, evidence occasionally surfaces thatsuggests that at lower levels, relations can involvespecial advisers banging the table – sometimesmetaphorically, sometimes not – in the process of givingorders to civil servants. For example, at the Treasury,Shriti Vadera, one of Gordon Brown’s special advisers,


24


was famous for reducing junior civil servants to tears,and shouting at them so much that she earned thenickname ‘Shriti the Shriek’.16 A civil servant whoalleged that she was bullied and intimidated by specialadvisers at the Department for Education agreed to asettlement prior to the case reaching an industrialtribunal, but some of its details were neverthelessreported.17 Those are obviously extreme cases. Howrepresentative they are of the general run of specialadviser behaviour is difficult to assess, and I shall notattempt to do so. My point is that whether it is donepolitely or aggressively, special advisers give orders tocivil servants.

Concerns about the extent to which special adviserswere assuming de facto management functions overcareer civil servants surfaced in a debate in the Lords on1 May 2002. They came up in a report of the Committeeon Standards in Public Life, ‘Defining the Boundarieswithin the Executive: Ministers, Special Advisers and thepermanent Civil Service’. Tony Blair responded to thoseanxieties by making a change to the Code of Conduct forSpecial Advisers that removed their power to ‘instruct’civil servants. It is not clear whether this had any effect.At any rate, when he became prime minister in 2007Gordon Brown felt it was necessary once again toremove any power special advisers might have had togive civil servants commands.

Did that finally make sure that special advisers werenot able to give commands to civil servants? Whathappens in reality does not automatically follow whatan order in council says should happen. If JonathanPowell is correct in maintaining that it was quiteunnecessary to give him, as a special adviser, the formalpower through an order in council to give instructions

25



to civil servants, it follows that nothing was lost whenthat power was formally rescinded in 2007. Whichmeans we can expect a degree of continuity between thepowers that Powell says all special advisers exercisedover permanent officials during the Blair years, and thepowers that they have exercised over civil servantssince then. Has the situation in fact changed in the yearssince 2007? Charles Clarke told the Lords ConstitutionCommittee in 2012:

There were examples, certainly in the last Labourgovernment, of senior ministers who took keypolicy decisions closeted with their special advisersand… were not ready to allow civil servants tocomment on them. Some current ministers [in thethen Coalition government] do that too.18

Nick Hillman, who was special adviser to theuniversities and science minister David Willetts, hasstressed that when their minister was absent forwhatever reason, ‘special advisers become the voice, aswell as the eyes and ears, of their minister at manyinternal government meetings... In such periods, specialadvisers can also become the main (rather than theinitial) point of call for clearing parliamentaryquestions, ministerial correspondence, and commentsfor the press’.19 That is to say: they give instructions tocivil servants. Dominic Cummings, who was specialadviser to Michael Gove at the Department forEducation, states on his blog:

Most of my job was converting long-term goals intoreality via policy, operational planning, and projectmanagement. This requires focus on daily, weekly,monthly, and quarterly steps, and management to make sure people are doing what is needed to get there.


26


The ‘people’ that Cummings refers to here are civil servants: he clearly felt it was part of his job tomanage them.20

I have spoken to a number of civil servants, mostly atmid-levels of seniority, about the power of specialadvisers. unfortunately, their contract prevents themfrom talking publicly about their employment, so Icannot identify them. But they were unanimous insaying the special advisers had a great deal of power,both over civil servants and over what sort of advice theminister received: one was even explicit that he hadseen ‘many senior civil servants’ careers ruined becausethey cannot get on with spads’. I observed specialadvisers giving orders to civil servants when I wasemployed as a civil servant (rather than a specialadviser) to write speeches for Theresa May at the HomeOffice. They certainly gave orders to me.

How can this happen? How can special advisers be ina position to give orders to permanent civil servants?Particularly given that the Code of Conduct for SpecialAdvisers specifically states that ‘special advisers mustnot… exercise any power in relation to the managementof any part of the civil service’? One part of theexplanation is that the code also states that specialadvisers ‘may, on behalf of their ministers: conveyministers’ views and work priorities; request officials toprepare and provide information and data, includinganalyses and papers; hold meetings with officials todiscuss the advice being put to ministers’.

Special advisers are chosen personally by the ministerfor whom they work. They have a very close relationshipwith that minister. They have direct and unfetteredaccess to him or her in a way that civil servants, with theexception of the prime minister’s principal private

27



secretary and the department’s permanent secretary, donot. They can claim to represent the minister and tospeak for him or her. The anodyne phrase ‘convey toofficials ministers’ views and work priorities’ does notquite communicate the authority that special advisersderive from being able to claim to be the minister’srepresentative – which is an accurate description of whatthey are. That role gives them an ability to commandcivil servants that goes far beyond merely ‘requesting’anything. Special advisers can say that they are notviolating the code because it is not they who are doingthe commanding: it is the minister, who is of courseentitled to command civil servants, for a civil servant’srole is to serve their minister. Because they insist they aremerely the means through which the minister’s‘requests’ are conveyed, special advisers can claim,when issuing orders to civil servants, to be acting in away that is completely legitimate.

Ministers are aware of this, and can be presumed toendorse it. It is significant that in 2005, the code ofconduct was altered so that the role of special adviserwas changed from ‘giving advice only’ to ministers, andreplaced with ‘providing assistance’ to ministers –which is a far broader, and much less specific, role. In adebate on the matter in the Lords on 7 November 2005,Lord Macdonald, the former Cabinet Office minister,stated he welcomed ‘the recent change in the civilservice order in council to formalise what was alwaysblindingly obvious: namely, that the key role of specialadvisers is to give more than advice to ministers; it isgive assistance’. He added that ‘such assistance canencompass conveying instructions and commissioningworks’.21 Lord Macdonald would have been aware thatin 2003, Tony Blair had altered the Code of Conduct for


28


Special Advisers to delete the power to ‘instruct’ civilservants. He clearly did not think it made a materialdifference to their powers. Gordon Brown, as primeminister, pushed through the Constitutional Reformand Governance Act 2010, which put the civil service,for the first time, on a statutory footing. That actconfirmed the description of the special adviser’s roleas ‘providing assistance to the minister’.

While the giving of ‘assistance’ to ministers mayformally describe what special advisers do, it does notcapture the power that it gives them over civilservants. As far as I can tell, the Joint Committee onthe Constitutional Reform Bill (it became theConstitutional Reform and Governance Act) is the onlyparliamentary committee to have noticed that therecould be a problem with the description of a specialadvisers’ purpose as to ‘assist a minister ’. Thecommittee observed that ‘“assist” [is] a flexibledefinition that suggests any number of possible tasksmay be permissible’. As a consequence, ‘the Code ofConduct for Special Advisers provides for specialadvisers to exercise what are in effect managementfunctions over career officials, such as communicatinginstructions from ministers and asking them to take ontasks’. It recommended that the code be ‘clarified torule out managerial functions’.22

The code has indeed been modified in a way which,in theory, rules out special advisers having managerialfunctions over permanent officials. But their purpose,as defined by the code, remains to ‘assist’ ministers, andthey may ‘convey ministers’ views and work priorities’.The result? In practice, special advisers’ managerialpowers over civil servants remain. Nor does the phrase‘give assistance to ministers’ reflect the extent to which

29



they can marginalise the advice provided to ministersby permanent civil servants.

The Code of Conduct for Special Advisers states thatspecial advisers ‘must not suppress or supplant theadvice being prepared for ministers by permanent civilservants, although they may comment on such advice’.I suppose writing ‘This is shit’ in the margin (as onespecial adviser notoriously used to do at the HomeOffice) counts as a comment on advice, rather thansuppressing or supplanting it. But special advisers are uniquely well-placed to suppress or supplant advice from civil servants. As Paul Richards, who wasspecial adviser to Hazel Blears at the Department forCommunities and Local Government, emphasised in hisevidence to the Lords Constitution Committee: ‘Thespecial adviser reads everything that goes into the[minister’s] red box. They have the prerogative to writea covering note on top of everything.’ This obviouslyplaces them in a position of great power, because asLord (Charles) Powell (who, as a civil servant, wasMargaret Thatcher’s private secretary on foreign affairs)noted, ‘we all know that the last voice is the one thatcounts most’.23

There is, as far as I can ascertain, no direct evidence –there’s no formal admission or statement - that specialadvisers suppress or supplant advice from civilservants. The closest that a (former) special adviser getsto admitting doing this is when Nick Hillman states thathe regularly inserted into David Willetts’ red box papersthat had failed the regular civil service clearing process:that is, papers which senior permanent officials haddecided should not go forward to the minister, becausethose officials thought they weren’t significant enoughto bother him with. Hillman recalls that he read those


30


‘non-papers’, and if he thought any of them weresufficiently interesting, he made sure that David Willettssaw them.24 If Hillman thought he could legitimatelyinclude material that officials thought David Willettsshould not see, he presumably also thought he couldexclude material that those officials thought DavidWilletts should be given. I do not know whether heactually did this, but it would be very surprising ifspecial advisers were not occasionally tempted tosuppress or supplant advice from civil servants, and didnot, once in a while, give in to that temptation. But it ishard for anyone else to know when, or if, that hashappened. Lord Turnbull, in his evidence to the JointCommittee on the Constitutional Reform Bill, indicatedthat he thought it had been happening, which is why hehad written into the Code of Conduct for SpecialAdvisers that they should not suppress or supplant civilservice advice. Special advisers, he insisted, ‘should notget into a position where they try to dictate what goesto the minister and what does not – and I think that hasbeen the case in recent years.’25

The issue is not whether special advisers are talented,able, diligent and provide their ministers with goodadvice. The issue is simply that however good theiradvice is, it is not impartial or objective. The whole pointof having special advisers is that they should bepolitically engaged. If they are gradually, but effectively,marginalising and supplanting advice from civilservants, the result would eventually be to change theway in which we are governed. It would be to undo the1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, which established theprinciple that elected politicians in positions ofexecutive authority should be advised principally byimpartial and objective civil servants selected on merit,

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not on the basis of ministerial patronage – which is how special advisers are chosen. To repeat: themarginalisation of civil service advice is a process, andone which happens by degrees. The civil service hasnever had a monopoly on providing policy advice toministers, and nor should it. But it is important thatpolicy proposals, wherever they come from, aresubjected to the objective and impartial scrutiny whichthe current civil service was set up to provide.

I am not claiming that the civil service has beenpoliticised: permanent civil servants are still appointedon merit, not patronage, and the culture of honesty,objectivity and impartiality is alive and well within thecivil service. I am claiming that the process of givingadvice to ministers is being politicised, with the resultthat ministers do not get the amount of objective,impartial advice from permanent officials that they usedto. The result is not, or not yet, the elimination of allobjective and impartial advice on policy from the civilservice. It is its steady diminution, to the point where itcan be seriously questioned whether the policies thatare in fact implemented have been modified by thatimpartial and objective advice.

There are two factors which combine to produce thatresult. One is the power that special advisers derivefrom their closeness to their minister, which enablesthem to intervene directly to dictate what civil servantsdo and what the minister sees. The other is theircapacity to intimidate civil servants, especially juniorand mid-ranking ones, by the way in which they use theauthority that they have as their minister’srepresentative. Special advisers do not often admit thatthey have the power to do this. But Giles Wilkes, whowas Vince Cable’s special adviser from 2010 to 2014,


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does so when he reflects that special advisers’ ‘abilityto cow civil servants does not imply a similar ability tobend reality’. That statement, made in the context of adiscussion of how special advisers ‘need to do morethan just find an idea they like and aggressively push itthrough’, indicates that Wilkes thinks that intimidatingcivil servants can be a routine part of the way that manyspecial advisers operate.

All the civil servants that I spoke to – and they wereall junior or mid-ranking rather than senior –maintained that the special advisers they dealt withfrequently used the authority of their minister tooverrule, ignore, and occasionally insult and bullypermanent officials, with the predictable effect thatmany of them gave up on ‘speaking truth to power’: itwas too intimidating, too costly, and too difficult to doso. If that is happening, it means that the civil service isnot able to perform the role that, constitutionally, it ismeant to: of providing impartial and objective adviceon the democratically-elected government’s policies.Wilkes himself stresses that ‘vast swathes of policyhappen – or are prevented – because of the work ofspads’. He notes: ‘The amount of formal and informaldelegation to the special adviser raises anotherquestion: how can anyone tell whether they areexceeding their authority?’ He adds that ‘the straightanswer is that they cannot’.26

You might ask why, if special advisers flout the spiritand the letter of their code in the way I have alleged,there are not many more reports of their misconduct.There are very few such reports. The Constitution unitat university College London produced a research notethat lists reports of misconduct by special advisers from1997 to 2013. It reported that there had been 26 public

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allegations of misconduct by special advisers duringthat period, which works out at an average of less thantwo per year. But if I am correct, there are going to benumerous special advisers who violate the coderoutinely, probably every week and possibly every day.What explains the disparity between the way some of them behave and the absence of complaints about their conduct?

Public allegations of misconduct are those that reachthe media, particularly newspapers. Newspapers areparticularly interested in personal attacks conducted byspecial advisers on other ministers or members of theopposition, and in misconduct that involves specialadvisers dealing with the media. They are not generallyinterested in the workings of Whitehall. It was clearly a‘story’ when Damian McBride, one of Gordon Brown’sspecial advisers, was found to be planning to launch awebsite that would be devoted to personal attacks onpolitical opponents. (In his book about his time as aspecial adviser, McBride also admits to planting innewspapers attacks on other Labour ministers, and tomanufacturing a ‘briefing war’ which led to the sackingof Charles Clarke as home secretary.) It is difficult to seehow a story entitled ‘special adviser gives orders to civilservant’ would ever make it into a national or even aprovincial newspaper – so it is not surprising that nonedo. Furthermore, any permanent official who decidedto go to a newspaper with claims that special adviserswere violating the code by giving orders to civilservants would stand a very good chance of endingtheir career: a condition of their employment is nottalking in public about the civil service. This is sufficientto explain why very few allegations of special advisermisconduct ever end up in the newspapers, and why


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those that are published almost invariably relate toallegations involving special advisers and their relationswith the media.

Why, however, is there silence – as there seems to be –from permanent secretaries and other top civil servantson the matter? One reason may be that they are not oftenin a position to know what is happening. A permanentsecretary of a large department usually does not observethe day to day interactions of special advisers and civilservants. Their job is to serve their minister. They knowthat special advisers are personally chosen by theirminister, and have a closer relationship with him or herthan does any permanent civil servant. They may simplynot be aware of how special advisers are behavingtowards mid-level or junior civil servants, and the waythat it affects the work which those civil servants do.

Permanent secretaries may also be confusedthemselves about what special advisers are permittedto do. Sir Jonathan Stephens, who was permanentsecretary at the Department for Culture, Media andSport (DCMS) from 2006 to 2013, is a very experiencedand well-regarded senior civil servant. Yet hisinterrogation before the Leveson Inquiry revealed thathe was not aware that a special adviser should not takeon the role of an intermediary in a quasi-judicialfunction – as Adam Smith, Jeremy Hunt’s specialadviser, appeared to do when Hunt, as culture secretary,had to consider whether to allow News Corporation’sbid for BSkyB. Smith exchanged 500 texts, emails andphone conversations with an individual representingNews International. News Corporation was then theholding company for News International, so providinginformation to that individual was effectively providingit to News Corporation.

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The permanent secretary seems to have known aboutthe contact and approved of it: Sir Jonathan stated thathe was ‘not aware of any guidance which suggests thatit is inappropriate for special advisers to be involved indecisions of this sort’,27 a position which Lord Hartfound ‘astonishing’.28 Lord Hart, a successful solicitor,had been expert legal adviser to the Labour lordchancellors Lord Irvine and Lord Falconer. On legal andconstitutional matters, Lord Hart obviously knowswhat he is talking about. He thought it was obvious thatspecial advisers should not be involved in that sort ofdecision, as did Charles Clarke, the former homesecretary. Lord Hart’s position is certainly the correctone: ministers or officials acting in a quasi-judicialcapacity are expected to act impartially and apolitically.It would be rightly thought outrageous if anygovernment decision on whether or not a takeovershould be allowed was made on the basis of whetherthe company had done enough to help the party inpower. Adam Smith’s extensive contacts with arepresentative from News International made it look asif that is exactly how the decision was going to be taken.Moreover, the Code of Conduct for Special Advisersitself says that ‘special advisers must not have anyinvolvement in the award of external contracts’. In determining whether News Corporation could takeover BSkyB, the DCMS was not strictly speakingawarding an external contract. But it was doingsomething very close to it. That is why Sir Jonathan’sapparent inability to recognise that Smith was doingsomething wrong is so surprising.

Jeremy Hunt denied that he had authorised, or knewabout, his special adviser’s contact with NewsInternational. On the day that Adam Smith resigned, Sir


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Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, wrote to allpermanent secretaries to ‘clarify the rigorousprocedures that departments should have in place forhandling all quasi-judicial decisions’. While the‘clarification’ did not explicitly prohibit special advisersfrom being involved in those decisions, it emphasised:

Quasi-judicial decisions are generally for theminister, with contacts normally made throughofficial channels... There should be no private orfavoured channels of communication with any oneparty... A special adviser approached by aninterested party should refer the matter to theappropriate [civil service] official.29

If a civil servant of Sir Jonathan’s standing andexperience can fail to recognise a clear case ofmisconduct by a special adviser, it is hardly surprisingthat there is considerable confusion amongst all parties– ministers, civil servants, and special advisers – aboutwhat special advisers are actually permitted to do. Andfew cases of wrongdoing are going to be as blatant asAdam Smith’s: because of the ambiguities in the Codeof Conduct for Special Advisers, it is often going to be amatter of interpretation and of opinion as to whetherwhat a special adviser has done counts as misconduct.

The code states:

Where any permanent civil servant has concernsabout any request coming from a special adviser,they should discuss that concern with their linemanager, the special adviser concerned, theminister’s principal private secretary or theirpermanent secretary. If a civil servant feels forwhatever reason that he or she is unable to do this,then they may wish to raise the concern with the

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departmental nominated officer(s) or directly withthe cabinet secretary or civil service commissioners.

That all sounds fine, but in practice, many civilservants told me that they felt extremely reluctant totake a step such as complaining about a specialadviser’s behaviour to a departmental nominatedofficer – let alone going to see the cabinet secretary orcivil service commissioners.

The reason is not just that making complaints is seenas damaging to your career. It is also because, as SirJonathan Stephens found, it can be hard to be sure whena special adviser has done something wrong. Theboundary between a ‘request’ and an order from aspecial adviser, for example, is not always obvious. It isfrequently very unclear as to whether they have askedan official to do something that is the wrong side of thepolitical boundary; or when they are deliberatelysuppressing or ignoring civil service advice in order toprevent the minister from being able to assess it. It isvery difficult for civil servants to complain to thepermanent secretary, or even to a line manager, whenthey are unsure of whether a line has been crossed anda special adviser has behaved in an improper orunacceptable way. The special adviser has the authorityof the minister, and for many civil servants, talking tothe special adviser will be the closest they ever get toproviding the minister with advice.

The conduct of special advisers is anyway not theresponsibility of the permanent secretary. It is theresponsibility of the minister. The permanent secretaryhas no disciplinary, or even managerial, powers over special advisers. The 2010 Ministerial Code stressesthat the ultimate responsibility for initiating any


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investigation into misconduct by a special adviser lieswith the appointing minister. Everyone who works inthe civil service is aware of the special relationshipbetween special advisers and their minister, and howdifficult and unwelcome it is to try to disturb orundermine it. Making an official complaint that specialadvisers are not treating civil servants correctly, or arefailing to follow proper procedures, is a step that anyjunior or mid-ranking permanent official is veryreluctant to take. Very few have done so, and the detailsof their complaints have not been made public, usuallybecause the civil servant leaves with an out-of-courtsettlement, the condition of which is that neither sideever talks about it.

That ministers are responsible for disciplining theirown special advisers in practice means that their codeof behaviour depends on what their minister will letthem get away with. Individual instances ofunacceptable behaviour by special advisers often turnout to have been tacitly, and sometimes even explictly,endorsed by their ministers. Permanent secretariesrarely feel in a position to reprimand the minister theyserve for giving too much leeway to a special adviser.As one retired senior civil servant, discussing the caseof Jo Moore, told Yong and Hazell: ‘Jo Moore wasn’tunder control because Byers [the secretary of state] didnot want it. He gave her licence, she took it.’30

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3

The new Machiavellisand the job of the court

There may be a further reason why permanent officialsaccept behaviour from special advisers that violatesthe code, and which they would not accept from othercivil servants: they may recognise that, whilst civilservants are trained to be objective and impartial, andto be scrupulously honest in their dealings with thepublic, those qualities are not the ones most needed forpolitical effectiveness – which civil servants obviouslyrecognise is of primary importance to ministers, and is what special advisers are meant to help theirminister achieve.

In an essay entitled ‘Politics and Moral Character’, thephilosopher Bernard Williams argued that effectivenessin politics often requires some fairly unpleasantpersonal characteristics.1 The argument goes back toMachiavelli – and in this context, it is significant thatJonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s most powerful specialadviser, entitled his book The New Machiavelli. That titlesignals very clearly that Powell thinks that, just asMachiavelli had shown many of the ethical principlesthat moralists ancient and medieval had thought shouldgovern the conduct of princes were bogus and wouldlead to their ruin, so many procedures thought today by

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many authorities on government (such as, for example,senior civil servants) to be essential to good governmentare in fact pointless and only damage the ability of anelected government to wield power effectively.

For example, Machiavelli was unambiguous thatprinces should only tell the truth when it was to theiradvantage – and since there were plenty of occasionswhen it would be more expedient to lie, a sensibleprince would lie frequently. This was shocking in the16th century, and it is shocking now: as citizens, weexpect to be told the truth by our rulers. For an electedpolitician, especially one wielding executive power, tobe caught lying to parliament or indeed in any publicstatement is a resigning offence. The obligation to tellthe truth is usually thought to run to all governmentofficials. It would certainly be thought outrageous if anyofficial document stated that a certain class of officialswere excused from the obligation to tell the truth to thepublic, in the way that special advisers are excused fromthe civil service requirement to be impartial andobjective. Honesty is one of the fundamental principlesof government service in a democracy – and the Codeof Conduct for Special Advisers duly states that ‘specialadvisers should not deceive or knowingly mislead the public’.

Jonathan Powell, however, seems to agree withMachiavelli that an absolute prohibition on lying to thepublic is unreasonable, and is one that special advisersshould not take too seriously. In The New Machiavelli, hestates, for example:

A leader must be seen in public to be a superman,although of course he is an ordinary mortal likeeveryone else. It is the job of the court [i.e., the staffat Number 10] to make him appear other than he

41

THE NEW MACHIAVELLIS AND THE JOB OF THE COuRT


really is… A prime minister is therefore neverallowed to be sick.2

Powell seems to be claiming that politically effectiveofficials should deliberately deceive the public on thestate of the leader’s health. Covering up Tony Blair’sphysical ailments, as Powell stresses that he and his teamdid, may seem trivial, and in many ways it is, but it isthe thin end of a very thick wedge. An official preparedto lie about a trivial matter is more likely to be preparedto lie about a serious one – which is why there is acarefully incubated culture within the civil service oftelling the truth about everything, even minor matters.3

This is not to say that permanent civil servants havenever been known to mislead the public. Obviouslythey have done so, and no doubt some of them still do.It is simply to point out that the culture of the civilservice is strongly against it – in a way that, if JonathanPowell is correct, the culture of special advisers is not,and should not be. Once again, the argument is falsifiedif made into an all-or-nothing proposition, withinflexibly honest civil servants on one side, andrelentlessly mendacious special advisers on the other.That extreme position does not accurately describe whathappens, and it is no part of my argument that it should.My claim is rather that special advisers are more likelyto subordinate the principles that civil servants thinkshould dictate their actions – such as honesty andintegrity – to considerations of political effectiveness,with the results that Machiavelli would have thoughtentirely appropriate.

In 1986 Lord (Robert) Armstrong, then cabinetsecretary, admitted under cross examination in acourtroom in Australia that he had been ‘economical


42


with the truth’ in one of his letters: he had suggested incorrespondence with the publishers of Peter Wright’sSpycatcher that Whitehall officials had not read the book,when in fact some had. His misleading statement – heinsisted that’s what it was, rather than an outright lie –was on a trivial matter, and one irrelevant to thegovernment’s case. But it generated an enormousamount of odium. Armstrong himself never acceptedthat he had been culpably dishonest. He shared thealmost universal sentiment that it was quite wrong thata civil servant, especially one of the most senior inBritain, should tell less than the whole truth on anymatter. That is still the position within the civil service:telling the truth is a central value, and it should neverbe compromised, certainly not for the aim of securingparty political advantage.

As a special adviser, Jonathan Powell may possiblyhave had a less rigid attitude to truth-telling. Let’s grantthat he and Machiavelli are right that effective politicalaction requires not being too scrupulous about keepingto conventional moral rules, such as always telling thetruth. But as citizens in a democracy – as opposed tomembers of a political party seeking party politicaladvantages – we have an interest in not being lied to onany matter by government officials. That is why mostof us are relieved that the culture of truth-telling hasbeen so carefully inculcated in the civil service, and areeager that it should remain.

Civil servants, however, may themselves recognisethat there is something in Machiavelli’s (and Powell’s)claim that political effectiveness requires a willingnessto depart from a strict adherence to principles such asalways telling the truth to the public – and thatrecognition may restrict their ability to object when

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special advisers do such things which they, aspermanent civil servants, are trained to take care not todo: such as issuing misleading statements or givingpolitically slanted assessments of the impact ofparticular policy proposals. Civil servants may be ableto keep their integrity intact, and their commitment tohonesty, impartiality and objectivity unimpugned, byleaving special advisers to do the ‘dirty work’ necessaryfor political effectiveness. But the cost is that specialadvisers’ role increases in significance, and civil serviceadvice is marginalised to an ever-increasing degree.

It takes a certain degree of confidence for a civil servantto advise their minister that the policy they have beenelected to implement is mistaken, and to state: ‘Nominister. This policy is a waste of money: it will not work.’There is a recognised procedure which a permanentsecretary – who is constitutionally responsible foraccounting to parliament’s Public Accounts Committeeon how money in the department in which he or sheworks is spent – can follow should they be convinced,after considering the evidence, that pursuing a particularpolicy or action to which the minister is attached wouldbe a waste of public money, or in some way improper orillegal. Permanent secretaries can insist that they will notimplement the policy without a ‘ministerial direction’:written instructions from the minister. When thathappens, the minister, not the permanent secretary, nowbecomes personally responsible for justifying toparliament how the money will be spent. That procedureusually forces a ministerial reconsideration of the policy.Still, if having reconsidered it the minister continues tothink that the policy is worth its cost, he is entitled tooverrule the permanent secretary, and the permanentsecretary is obliged to implement it.


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Lord (Gus) O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary,described a permanent secretary’s decision to ask for aministerial direction as ‘the nuclear option’. It is not usedvery often: there have been fewer than 55 ministerialdirections issued in the 25 years since 1990.4 Issuing arequest for a ministerial direction usually indicates abreakdown of some kind in the relationship between thepermanent secretary and the minister. A fundamentaldisagreement on whether a policy counts as value formoney or complies with legality or propriety cannothappen without a very significant loss of trust.

It is hard to work out whether there have been morerequests for ministerial directions issued in the lastdecade than in earlier periods, because until 2011, neitherthe fact that a ministerial direction had been issued, norits content, was made public with any regularity. It iseven harder to work out what it would mean if there hadbeen an increase in requests for ministerial directions:would it mean that the relationship between ministersand permanent secretaries was breaking down moreoften? Or would it mean that permanent secretaries hadmore confidence in opposing their minister’s wishes? Itis difficult to know for sure, but it is unlikely to mean thatpermanent secretaries have more confidence in opposingministerial wishes today than they used to. There is aconsensus that – as Bernard Jenkin, the chairman of thePublic Administration Select Committee, put it – ‘eversince the time of Margaret Thatcher, when she started totry to change the civil service, there is the sense that thecivil service no longer has the confidence to tell the truthto power in the way that it did’.5

Because she was such a forceful and energeticpolitician, and because she expressed her convictions sodirectly, Mrs Thatcher’s scepticism about the reliability

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and effectiveness of the civil service had a verypowerful effect. She made no secret of the fact that shethought that civil servants were timid, risk averse, andreconciled to managing Britain’s national decline. Shewanted to reduce their pay and pensions. Sir JohnHoskyns, who was head of her policy unit at Number10 until May 1982, insisted that her priority was to‘deprivilege the civil service’. She brought in Sir DerekRayner, the former boss of Marks and Spencer, to shakeit up. She abolished the Central Policy Review Staff(CPRS), an organisation half of whose staff consisted ofcareer civil servants, and whose purpose was to suggestpolicy initiatives that would help to deal with changesover the long term. That move was described by Sir IanBancroft, then head of the civil service, as a ‘sad blowby prejudice against civilisation.’ He retired early, twoand a half years after she was first elected. The CPRS’srole was taken over by the policy unit, which had asignificantly higher portion of its staff chosen for theirpolitical commitments.6

But although her rhetoric was extremely critical of thecivil service, Mrs Thatcher in fact drew on the advice ofsenior civil servants to a considerable extent. She workedvery closely with the officials she trusted, such as RobertArmstrong, Robin Butler and Charles Powell. The longershe was in Number 10, the more she seemed toappreciate the institution’s virtues. By the time she wroteher autobiography, she could state: ‘The sheerprofessionalism of the British civil service, which allowsgovernments to come and go with a minimum ofdislocation and a maximum of efficiency, is somethingother countries with different systems have every causeto envy.’7 By the standards of Tony Blair, Gordon Brownand David Cameron, she had very few outside advisers


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providing an alternative to senior civil servants’ counsel:she only appointed 14 special and expert advisers overthe whole period of her premiership, compared with themore than a hundred outside advisers that Blair, Brownand Cameron have each had working for them. All thesame, her hostile pronouncements in public about thecivil service unquestionably helped legitimise the viewthat a government that was determined to get thingsdone efficiently and quickly needed to bypass seniorcivil servants by bringing in energetic and above allpolitically committed outsiders who could be reliedupon to implement policies, rather than to criticise them.

When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, hearrived with 73 special advisers. He and his cabinet tookit for granted that the civil service could not be trustedto give impartial and objective advice: the views of civilservants, probably Conservative to begin with, werebound to have been shaped by 15 years of serving theTories. Patrick Diamond, an adviser to Blair, wrote in anarticle for Political Studies Review in 2011 that ‘civilservants were often treated as an accident waiting tohappen, and were thought [by the Blair government]largely incapable of producing rigorous, evidence-basedpolicy’. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, claimedthat when it came to assessing how well any individualminister was doing, ‘ministers’ drivers usually had a farbetter [that is, more accurate] assessment of them thantheir permanent secretaries.’ Gordon Brown wasnotorious for not trusting most of his civil serviceofficials, preferring to ‘work almost exclusively throughan inner group of loyal advisers’.8

Tony Blair’s own attitude towards the civil serviceappeared to have moderated by 2004. After nearly sevenyears in government, he gave a speech on civil service

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reform which started by praising civil servants. Heinsisted: ‘The myth on which young Labour activistswere reared in the 1970s and 80s of a civil service thatwas Tory to its bones, turned out to be just that: a myth.’He emphasised that the civil service ‘has strengths thatare priceless. The greatest is indeed its integrity.’ But healso stressed: ‘The principal challenge [that the civilservice has to face] is to shift from policy advice todelivery.’ He made it clear that while he recognised andappreciated the civil service’s ability to give advice‘without fear or favour’, he didn’t want it. What heneeded from the civil service was not advice, but theefficient and effective implementation of the policiesthat he and his special advisers had already decided on.And his main complaint, and the main reason why hethought the civil service needed reform, was that it wasnot performing that executive function properly. It wasstill trying to mould policy – a role he thought was nolonger appropriate for the civil service ‘in the modernworld’. As part of switching senior civil servants frombeing policy advisers to project managers, he proposeda four-year limit on all senior posts, and to make itmuch easier to appoint outsiders to top civil servicepositions. So while Blair appeared to be celebrating thestructure built by Northcote and Trevelyan - which hasthe civil service working as a junior partner with theelected government in producing workable andeffective policy – he was in fact undermining it.9

The process of changing the civil service from being asource of independent policy advice into an agency thatimplements government policy, but does not help tomake it, continued during the Conservative and LiberalDemocrat Coalition. Although the Coalition Agreementpromised that the new government would ‘put a limit


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on the number of special advisers’, which suggestedtheir number would be reduced, David Cameron has infact increased them: well over 100 were employed bythe Coalition. The prime minister has 26 special advisersworking just for him. Cameron promised to give thecivil service back its role in policy advice. But the claimthat the Downing Street Policy unit was ‘entirely staffedby civil servants’ was misleading, since it suggested thatthe organisation was staffed by career civil servants,politically independent individuals committed to theimpartial and objective assessment of policy. But manyof them were political appointees on short-termcontracts, chosen at least partly because of the strengthof their political convictions. Officially, special advisersare misleadingly categorised as ‘civil servants’, albeittemporary ones.10 As prime minister, David Cameronturned out to be rather less keen on policy advice fromcivil service officials committed to the Northcote-Trevelyan values of impartiality and objectivity than hisstatements as leader of the opposition suggested.

That the government should take advice from peoplewho are not career civil servants is not necessarily a badthing – most career civil servants think it is a good ideathat ministers should have sources of advice other thancareer civil servants. The issue is not the fact of outside,politically committed advice, but the extent to which ithas come to dominate, and to replace, the objective andimpartial advice provided by civil servants.

Put aside for a moment the question of whether theattempt to switch the focus of the civil service frompolicy advice to ‘delivery’ has made for better or worsegovernment: the issue here is the effect on the morale ofcivil service officials of that switch, together with thearrival of large numbers of special advisers, many of

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whom believe that their access to the secretary of stategives them authority to direct civil servants. Therecannot be much doubt that the principal effect has beento accelerate their loss of self-confidence. ProfessorsAnthony King and Ivor Crewe conclude:

Our study of blunders suggests that officials havebecome reluctant to speak truth to power. They donot want to speak largely because they believepower does not want to listen. Objection isconstrued as obstruction. Again and again in ourinterviews, former ministers as well as retired civilservants commented that even when officials hadharboured serious reservations about ministers’latest bright ideas, they failed openly to expresstheir reservations.11

In theory, one of the great advantages of a permanentcivil service is that it is the repository of a ‘corporatememory’: officials who have been in the samedepartment for several years should have a sense ofwhat works and what does not, because they have seenthe effects of several different governments’ policies.12

It is not necessarily a feature that is always appreciatedby ministers in a hurry to implement what they believeto be new, innovative policies. As Jonathan Powell says:

This deeply engrained fatalism is a serious problemin the upper reaches of the civil service. Havingbeen a civil servant myself, it is easy to understandhow it develops. When you have been wrestlingwith a problem for decades and you are familiarwith how difficult it is to resolve, when you knowthere are no easy answers and are reconciled tofailing again and again, it is difficult not to becynical about the fresh-eyed, bushy-tailed


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aspirations of a new minister who knows next tonothing about the problem and whose ‘new’policies are not new at all... From a minister’s pointof view, [civil servants’] negativism can becometiresome. He looks for a can-do spirit which insteadof incessantly pointing out the difficulties will comeup with solutions.13

Francis Maude made essentially the same point in hisevidence to PASC in 2012, when explaining why seniorcivil servants are not as effective at implementingpolicies as ministers want them to be:

Some of it is the old thing of ‘ministers come andministers go. We are the permanent civil service. Wehave been here, and our forebears have been here,for 150 years, and the system will exist afterministers go’.14

Corporate memory has unquestionably very seriouslydeclined within many departments in the last twodecades. That decline has coincided with the rise of special advisers. It may be a coincidence rather than cause and effect. But the extent of the decline iscertainly striking.

Part of the explanation is that there is a very highturnover of officials. Senior civil servants do not stay aslong in any one department as they used to. This meansthat they do not build up a repository of knowledge andexperience – or if they do, they move on just as theystart to be in a position to be able to put it to use.Between 2010 and 2012, all but two of the permanentsecretaries in 16 government departments changed. Infour departments, there were three different permanentsecretaries in two years. The former Labour ministerLord (Andrew) Adonis observed: ‘It is a misnomer to

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describe what we have as a permanent civil service. Itis an impermanent civil service... it lacks the keyattributes of continuity and expertise.’15 ChristopherHood, Gladstone Professor of Government at Oxforduniversity, testified that when he ‘did a study in the1990s of a civil service organisation, [it] had a 40 percent turnover a year, and as a result, it had virtually nocorporate memory; it could not even remember thingsthat had happened three months before, and it had tospend its whole time in meetings socialising people towhat had been happening.’16

Another cause of the loss of corporate memory is themove to electronic documents. Almost all reports, andall items of official communication, are now written oncomputers. There seems to be no system for filingdocuments generated on a computer in a way thatmeans they can be easily accessed by officials eager toknow what was said in the past on a particular topic.Many special advisers do not think this is a problem, forthe reason that Jonathan Powell expresses: consultingcivil servants’ past reflections will only reveal problems,when what is needed are solutions.

In a minor way, I had, during my spell at the HomeOffice, direct experience of the difficulties the inabilityto access what has been done in the past can cause. Oneof Theresa May’s special advisers told me that the homesecretary wanted to give a statement to parliament onthe police’s use of the technique known as stop andsearch. Part of the motive for doing this, he explained,was political: stop and search is a policy whichconsistently alienates members of the black community.I was told that it would help the home secretary’sstanding with Afro-Caribbeans if she made a statementthat was critical of the police’s use of stop and search.


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The grounds would essentially be that the tool wasracist, or at least used by the police in a racist way: thestatistics demonstrated that you were six or seven timesmore likely to be stopped and searched if you were amember of an ethnic minority.

In fact, the Home Office had done research in therelatively recent past which showed that the statisticsdo not demonstrate this. P.A.J. Waddington, now aprofessor at Wolverhampton university, worked for theHome Office during the late 1990s and the early yearsof this century. In the wake of the publication of theMacpherson report into the Metropolitan Policeinvestigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence,Waddington was part of a Home Office team thatlooked carefully at the Met’s use of stop and search. Thetask was to establish if indeed it was being used in aracist way, as the ‘six or seven times more likely’ statisticsuggests. It was noted that the statistic was obtained bylooking at the percentage of the total number of stopand search incidents that a particular ethnic group wassubject to, and then dividing it by the percentage thatthat ethnic group makes up of the population of the uKas a whole. If you then compare the figure thatcalculation generates for whites with the figure you getfor ethnic minorities, the result is that members ofethnic minorities are ‘six or seven times more likely tobe stopped’ than white people.

The Home Office research showed that calculatingrelative stop and search rates in that way is verymisleading. If you want to know if the police are stoppingand searching members of particular ethnic groups in abiased and possibly racist way, then what you need toknow is who is available to be stopped and searched onthe streets at the times that the police are stopping and

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searching people. For instance, the police stop and searcha miniscule number of women, of all races, over the ageof 70. Does this show they are biased in favour of thesewomen? Obviously not. It simply shows that the policedo not receive reports that women over the age of 70 havebeen involved in mugging people on the streets – andtherefore they are not useful or appropriate targets forbeing stopped and searched. Women over the age of 70also tend not to be on the streets at the times and in theplaces the police do stop and search.

The team of Home Office researchers felt it wasimportant to know the ethnic composition of thepopulation available to be stopped and searched in theplaces and at the times the police were implementingthat tactic. So they went out and counted it: theyidentified the percentage of the street population madeup by each ethnic group. They then compared that withthe percentage of stop and searches that were made upby each ethnic group. They discovered that, when youlooked at who was available to be stopped and searchedwhen the police were actually stopping and searchingon the streets, the ethnic bias disappeared. In fact, thepolice stopped slightly more white people than theyshould have done if you looked solely at theirproportion of the street population. The police, theHome Office research showed, did not target particularareas for stop and search because they wanted to stopand search people of a particular ethnic group. Theychose those areas because that’s where the highestamount of street crime was reported – and stop andsearch’s primary purpose is to diminish street crimessuch as mugging and robbery.17

But a decade later, not one official within the HomeOffice seemed aware of this work. No-one had heard of


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it. No-one could tell me where I could find it. There wasno Home Office library where such items werecatalogued and so available for being accessed – or ifthere was, no official I talked to knew about it. Inevertheless felt that it was important that this truth bereflected in any parliamentary statement made by thehome secretary. It would certainly be possible to pointout that there are many things wrong with stop andsearch, because there are: it is often implemented badly;those stopped are not given adequate reasons why theyare being stopped; they are often treated rudely andwithout the respect they are entitled to. But on its own,the statistical evidence of the way it is used does notsuggest that it is implemented in a racist way.

So that is what I put in my draft of her parliamentarystatement. The reaction was an explosion of rage fromthe special adviser, and an emphatic assertion thatWaddington’s point - that statistics on stop and search donot support the idea that it is implemented by the policein a racist way – would not be in the speech. He told me:‘Of course I could take this up with the home secretary.’But he did not. I doubt she was ever informed that thestatistic used to demonstrate police race bias in theapplication of stop and search was misleading. Thespecial adviser re-wrote the statement in the way hewanted it, with the misleading statistic, and she gave thestatement to parliament as he had written it on 2 July2013. The misleading statistic has reappeared in the homesecretary’s subsequent statements to parliament on thetopic (see, for example, her statement on 30 April 2014).

It is worth emphasising that the Home Office had nocorporate memory of research commissioned only adecade previously. It had no repository for that research.If this experience is representative, then it is no wonder

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that some of the same policy mistakes get repeated timeafter time: there is no facility that enables anyone tolearn from the past. To avoid making the same mistakesas your predecessors, you first have to know what thosemistakes were.


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4

The patronage virus and incompetent

government

It is rare to find anyone who will come out and statebluntly we would be better governed without thebenefit of a civil service dedicated to giving ministersthe benefit of the impartial and objective assessment oftheir policies. As I have already mentioned, nearlyeveryone, including ministers, stresses that they are infavour of that. There are, however, several politicianswho have said that they think the appointment of themost senior officials in the civil service should be on thebasis of political patronage: they should be short-termappointments chosen by the secretary of state.

Francis Maude’s proposals in the Civil Service ReformPlan of 2012, which would mean that ministers were ableto appoint their own permanent secretaries, appear toaim at ensuring that permanent secretaries werepolitically committed to implementing the secretary ofstate’s policies – although he denied that was what hewanted. But the Lords Constitution Committee, whichinvestigated Maude’s proposals, concluded: ‘Temporarycivil servants appointed in this [Maude’s] manner maynot feel able to speak truth unto power, particularly if

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there is an expectation that temporary appointments maybe extended or made permanent at the conclusion of thefixed term. There is a risk that such appointments maybe used as a means of increasing the political element ofthe civil service by the back door, or lead to cronyism.’1

At the time of writing (September 2015), thoseproposals have not yet been formally adopted by thepresent Conservative government.2 But there is a goodchance that they will be. While Francis Maude is nolonger an MP, David Cameron supported and endorsedhis plans for the reform of the civil service, including hisplans to give secretaries of state a much bigger role in theway that their permanent secretaries are appointed.Although the Conservative manifesto for the 2015General Election stated that the Conservatives ‘value ouroutstanding public servants’ and that ‘Britain’s impartial,professional and highly capable civil service is admiredaround the world and one of our nation’s strengths’,there is no indication that the prime minister has alteredhis views on the need to change the way permanentsecretaries are appointed so as to make them moreresponsive to the secretary of state’s political priorities.

Furthermore, David Cameron, when prime ministerof the Coalition government, endorsed ‘extendedministerial offices’ (EMOs), a proposal which allows asecretary of state to expand their private office byemploying additional advisers from outside the civilservice. There is no formal limit on the number ofadditional advisers, but they have to be funded withinexisting budgets and approved by the prime minister.There are various restrictions imposed on what they aresupposed to do, which include a prohibition on givingexplicitly political advice. Perhaps those restrictions willbe adhered to. It seems more likely, however, that they


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will be as closely observed as the ones that are supposedto prevent special advisers from giving instructions tocivil servants.

Prior to the 2015 election, no secretary of state tookup the opportunity to employ more advisers fromoutside the civil service, perhaps because there seemednot much point in doing so: little departmentalbusiness is done during the run-up to a generalelection. But since the Conservatives’ victory in May2015, several ministers have said that they will do it,including Nicky Morgan, secretary of state foreducation, who wants to appoint five additionaladvisers from outside the civil service, and AmberRudd, secretary of state for energy.

EMOs mark a further step in diminishing the roleplayed by civil servants in providing advice. Theirprimary role will not be to evaluate objectively andimpartially the policies that the secretary of state hasarrived in office to implement. It will be to endorse andto implement whatever has already been decided. Theywill aim to protect the secretary of state from criticism,not to expose him or her to it. It is already very difficultfor all but the most senior civil servants even to put aproposal to a minister which has not been vetted firstby political advisers. Extended ministerial offices arelikely to make it impossible.3

The gradual replacement of advice from impartialpermanent officials by counsel from politicallycommitted advisers suggests, once again, that manyministers’ repeated statements that they are dedicatedto preserving an objective, impartial civil serviceappointed solely on merit are not quite what they seem.In theory, elected politicians may be able to see that itmakes for good government if policies are subjected to

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THE PATRONAGE VIRuS AND INCOMPETENT GOVERNMENT


objective and impartial scrutiny, and that they shouldbe implemented by people who do not let party politicalconsiderations interfere with their decisions – especiallywhen a political party other than their own is in power.

In practice, however, when holding the reins ofgovernment, and trying to keep their promises to theelectorate and get the policies in their manifestoimplemented quickly and effectively, they demonstratea marked lack of enthusiasm for the process of impartialand objective advice, preferring the enthusiasm andcommitment of politically committed special adviserswho have been selected not on the basis of opencompetition, but through ministerial patronage. If thatprocess continues – and I emphasise again that it is aprocess, not something controlled by an on/off switch– then we will eventually end up with policies beingimplemented, and executive power being exercised,without the benefit of any impartial, objective advice.There will be no counterweight to the power of peoplewhose most pressing concern is to further the interestsof the political party that they serve.

There are many reasons for thinking that thisdevelopment will not improve the chances of goodgovernment, and that, as citizens and taxpayers, weshould be hostile to any changes that will end up bymaking it pervasive. The impartial scrutiny of policysignificantly diminishes the chances that governmentswill make laws and implement procedures that arewasteful and impractical – but which benefit thepoliticians who support them. It is easier than manypeople seem to realise to squander our inheritance ofrelatively efficient and uncorrupt government, andreplace it with what is the default position of moststates: government based on political patronage.


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The appointment of senior civil servants strictly onmerit, and their ability to give objective and impartialadvice, are not the same thing. But the two go together.Officials who are explicitly politically committed are notgoing to be objective and impartial in their assessmentsof their own party’s policies. It was the awareness ofthat truth that persuaded Northcote and Trevelyan in1854 that if Britain was to be well-governed, it neededa class of permanent officials who were not aligned toany political party, and who were appointed solely onthe basis of their ability to perform their service to thegovernment in an efficient and effective way.

Northcote and Trevelyan were right that one of thepurposes of the civil service is to reduce the chances thatunreasonable convictions would get in the way ofeffective administration. It is to act as a check on theattempt to implement proposals that could not succeedbecause they have been inadequately thought throughand are not going to achieve their intended result; orwhich should not be allowed to do so, because they werean attempt to do things which no government shouldattempt to do (such as – to take two contemporaryexamples – to qualify the prohibition on imprisonmentwithout a prior fair trial so as to permit the indefinitedetention of foreign nationals accused of terroristoffences, or to authorise the use of torture by stateagents).

That is why they thought that:

…the government of the country could not be carriedon without the aid of an efficient body of permanentofficers… possessing sufficient independence,character, ability and experience to be able to advise,assist, and to some extent, to influence those who arefrom time to time set over them.

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These people would be servants of the Crown, thesymbol of permanent government and authority, ratherthan of any party that happened to be in office. This wasthe origin of the idea that civil servants should ‘speaktruth unto power’. Their role was not simply to dowhatever they were told to; it was to point out toministers when their proposals were unworkable,impractical, illegal or unethical, and to advise themagainst attempting to implement such plans – andthereby to prevent, or at least to delay, theirimplementation. They should also suggest alternativesthat would be free of the defects they identified.

No-one should think that the return of a patronagesystem in this country, with all its negative effects onthe integrity and efficiency of government, isimpossible. ‘The patronage virus is never dead’,observed the former cabinet secretary Lord (Richard)Wilson, evidently drawing on his own experience at theheart of government, ‘and constantly needs to be beatenback’. The evidence from the history of government inboth Britain and other countries suggests Lord Wilson’sstatement is correct.

Still, the emphasis on the importance of advice fromimpartial and objective officials appointed on merit maynevertheless seem fundamentally mistaken, on thegrounds that it violates democratic principles. When theNorthcote-Trevelyan reforms were first projected,Britain was not a full democracy, and it would not beone even when those reforms had been (mostly)implemented by the start of the First World War:women did not have the vote, and nor did men whowere unable to meet the property qualification. Today,there is universal suffrage in this country. Ministersbelong to and have been chosen by the party that has


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received endorsement by election. Civil servants,however, have not been endorsed by any form ofdemocratic vote. They therefore cannot claim any rightto independent political power. What legitimate powerthey may possess, they possess because ministersdelegate it to them, on the understanding that they willcarry out the instructions issued to them. Ministers cantake that power back whenever they wish to – and theyshould take it back whenever any official does not dowhat they have been instructed to.

So what can possibly be wrong with giving ministerscomplete authority to select who serves them? How canthe marginalisation of advice from non-politicallyaligned officials be seen as anything other than thelegitimate extension of democratic authority – the onlylegitimate authority that there is? That argument is putby Michael Jacobs, who is visiting professor in theDepartment of Politics/School of Public Policy atuniversity College London, and was a special adviserto Gordon Brown between 2004 and 2010: ‘It is not clearwhy career officials – who are unelected andunaccountable – should have greater legitimacy toguide the policy process than advisers… advisers gettheir mandate from, and are accountable to, the electedminister. In this sense, political advisers could arguablybe said to have greater legitimacy than officials inpresenting choices to ministers.’5

The point can be pressed further. In a democracy, alllegitimate authority derives ultimately from the consentof those over whom that power is exercised. ‘Consent’is interpreted broadly, as it has to be for it to be possibleto govern any state whose population is less than totallyunanimous on every political and ethical issue. Thosewho did not vote for the winning party are assumed

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nonetheless to consent to be ruled by the democraticsystem: we are all taken to accept that the winners offree and fair elections are entitled to form the legitimategovernment. It means that ministers can claim thatwhen they exercise political power, they exercise it withthe consent of all the people, and not just those whovoted for them. Civil servants cannot say this. No-onevoted for them at all. And that is why they cannot claimto exercise legitimate political power in their own right.

Is there anything wrong with this argument? It iscertainly correct to maintain that all legitimate politicalauthority derives from consent, broadly conceived. It isalso correct that under our constitution, a majority inthe House of Commons, usually formed by the politicalparty that the majority represents, is taken to have theconsent of the electorate; and that consent is presumedto extend to all of the policies that are endorsed by thegovernment formed from that majority. But does itfollow from this that any check on policies supportedby a duly-elected government must be illegitimate? It does not. It is universally recognised thatdemocratically-elected governments can want toimplement policies that are wasteful, ineffective,oppressive, unethical or just plain stupid. If theargument that there can be no legitimate check onpolicies endorsed by the majority were correct, then itwould be a kind of category mistake to criticise a policythat a democratically-elected government wished toimplement: that the policy had the support of themajority would guarantee that it was right.

But of course the fact that a policy has been endorsedby the majority does not mean that it is impossible tofind faults with it and to question whether it is the rightthing to do. All mature democracies have devised some


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way of placing checks on what one of the framers of theAmerican Constitution, James Madison, called thepropensity of elected governments for ‘wicked orimproper projects’ – a phrase which, by the logic of the‘democratic’ argument, should be an oxymoron. Thereis no contradiction in the idea that in a democracy, whilethe government elected by the majority of the people isand ought to be sovereign, there should nevertheless besome restraints on what the elected government can dowith its power. Furthermore, were the argument thatthere should be no such restraints correct, it wouldfollow that it would not merely be legitimate, butmorally necessary, to politicise all institutions thatexercise any political power whatever, where ‘politicise’means ‘make them accord completely with the will ofthe party which won the last election’. That would bethe only way to ensure that every political institutionreflected the consent of the people, and so was in aposition to wield power legitimately.

In Britain, there are in fact several institutions withlegitimate authority whose purpose is to act as a checkon the will of the majority. They are not supposed tothwart it, and ultimately, if the majority in the House ofCommons decides to overrule their objections, it isentitled to do so. The institutions nevertheless exist inorder to ensure that the majority does not havecompletely unrestricted power: their purpose is torestrain the elected government’s occasional propensityto do unreasonable, unethical or otherwise inadvisablethings. The House of Lords is one example of such aninstitution. Its purpose at present is to scrutinise and tosometimes to delay legislation passed by the Commons,with the object of persuading the Commons to revise itsproposals in the way the Lords think is appropriate. The

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Lords cannot overturn legislation passed by a majorityin the Commons. They can only require the Commonsto ‘think again’. If, having thought again, the Commonsis still determined to implement the policy the Lordsoppose, there is nothing further the Lords can do aboutit. But it is widely, if not universally, recognised that itis sensible to have, as part of the process of law-making,a procedure which can require the government to pauseand re-assess its own proposals before imposing themas law.

The judiciary is another institution which, withincertain specified limits, is entitled to act as a restraint onpolicies that have been endorsed by the electedgovernment. Historically, judges have been able to askthe government to review a law, and even to quash it,on the basis that it violates a principle of natural justice(such as the right to a fair hearing, or the right not to bejudged by someone who has a personal stake in theoutcome of the case), or is so irrational that noreasonable person could possibly endorse it. Since theincorporation of the European Convention of HumanRights into British law, the judges on the Supreme Courthave also been able to declare that a piece of legislationis incompatible with the rights specified in theconvention. None of this gives judges the power tooverturn a policy to which the elected government iscommitted. Parliament can always pass another law (as,for example, happened when the Appeal Court ruledthat the government had been wrong to spenddevelopment money on helping Malaysia construct thePergau Dam6). But by ruling that a policy isincompatible with the Human Rights Act, senior judgescan increase the political costs of pursuing it veryconsiderably, to the point where the elected government


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decides that modifying or abandoning the initial law isthe better alternative. That has been the outcome onevery occasion when the Supreme Court has issuedsuch a ruling, as it did in the case of the Blairgovernment’s policy of indefinite detention of terroristsuspects without trial.

Both the House of Lords and the Supreme Court lackdemocratic legitimacy, in the straightforward sense thatneither judges nor the members of the Lords are elected,and they are not directly ‘accountable to the people’.Their decisions are frequently criticised on that basis,particularly by politicians whose policies they delay ordeclare to be in some way illegitimate. Nonetheless, Idon’t think there is any politician of any major politicalparty who would say that the whole idea that thereshould be checks on the kinds of laws a democratically-elected legislature can enact is just wrong. The argumentis about how extensive those checks should be, whatform they should take, and how they should beimplemented. It is not about whether they should bethere at all. It is perfectly compatible with commitmentto democracy to believe that within the government,there should be a body of impartial and objectiveofficials, selected according to their ability rather thanon the basis of political patronage, whose purpose is toscrutinise government policies and to advise ministerson whatever short-comings those policies may have.That is the role of the civil service – or at least it has been.

Should we, as taxpayers and citizens, want policieswhich the government has been elected to implementto be scrutinised objectively and impartially before theyare made into law? I do not see how that question canreasonably be answered with anything other than ‘yes’– even though objective and impartial scrutiny does not

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infallibly identify ‘wicked or improper projects’ (andeven if it did, officials would not be in a position toprevent ministers from going ahead with them). Inmany cases, officials will fail to recognise potentialproblems or be unable to articulate them clearly. Theymay also invent problems that are not actually there.But it must be the case that such scrutiny will reduce thelikelihood of policy blunders, at least compared withthe situation in which there is none, and the closestpolicies get to impartial scrutiny is the enthusiasticendorsement of politically committed supporters.

As far as I know, no-one has attempted to assess theextent to which civil service advice has preventedministers from implementing policies that, had theybeen put into practice, would have had disastrousconsequences. Like most historical hypotheticals, it issomething that is more or less impossible to assess,because it is impossible to know with any certainty whatwould have happened had policies that were abandonedor modified been implemented in their original form.But permanent officials obviously fail fairly often topersuade ministers to modify bad policy ideas, becausethere has been plenty of bad policy since the SecondWorld War, much of which has had effects opposite tothose intended. The closest I know to an audit ofgovernment policy successes and failures is Blunders ofOur Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe.Professor Crewe concludes from his part in that study:

Misgovernment is more often the result of over-hasty and ideologically-driven ministers ignoringthe advice of their officials and outside experts, andpressing ahead with proposals in a highlycentralised system of government that lacks checksand balances.6


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It is easier to identify examples of policies that seniorcivil servants should have intervened to try to preventministers from pressing ahead with – but did not.Professors King and Crewe list many in Blunders of OurGovernments, including the poll tax, the Child SupportAgency, the NHS IT system, the system of regional firecontrol centres and the system of tax credits introducedby Gordon Brown. Margaret Hodge, the Labour MPwho was chair of the Public Accounts Committee for the2010-2015 parliament, adds the decision of the lastLabour government to enter a contract for the purchaseof two aircraft carriers when the money to pay for themwas not available – which led to delays that added anestimated £2 billion to the cost.8 It may be too early toidentify clear policy blunders committed by ministersin the Coalition government that lasted from 2010 to2015. But Professors King and Crewe are of the viewthat we can be sure there have been many.

There would, however, almost certainly have beenmore of them had there only been politically committedadvisers, and no impartial officials. Despite the failuresto prevent incompetent policies catalogued in Blundersof Our Governments, it is better for the government ofthis country that we should, as Northcote and Trevelyanproposed, have ‘permanent officers… possessingsufficient independence, character, ability andexperience to be able to advise, assist, and to someextent, to influence those who are from time to time setover them.’ Their political independence is essential totheir value. Otherwise, it is just a case of ‘buying severalcopies of the morning newspaper in order to assureyourself that what it said was true’.9

None of this implies that permanent officials allperform their role perfectly, or that the civil service is

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not in need of reform. There are clearly problemsinherent in an order of bureaucrats who spend all oftheir careers in the service of the state. Officials are oftennot objective and impartial in the way that they shouldbe. They can be captured by special interest groups.They can treat compliance with arcane procedure as ifit were an inflexible moral code. They can succumb toinertia, and elevate the avoidance of any risk toludicrous heights. But in this context, the mostsignificant question is: do those problems pose a greaterthreat to the possibility of efficient and uncorruptgovernment than the alternative?

At the moment, the alternative is to hire, on short-termcontracts, either politically committed people, orbusinessmen who have demonstrated great success inthe private sector – let us call it ‘the market’. I think Ihave sufficiently outlined the threat that politicallycommitted advisers can pose to efficient and uncorruptgovernment. There are examples of civil servants who,once they become special advisers, can lie and cheatwith as great abandon as anyone: Damian McBride, theLabour special adviser who admitted fabricating storiesin an effort to discredit Gordon Brown’s political rivals,is a notorious example. But examples of McBride’s kindonly illustrate that an organisation which aims tobequeath to its members the values of integrity andhonesty sometimes fails to do so. They do not show thatit always fails, or that it has less success in passing thosevalues on than firms that do not even try. Generally,people who spend long periods as career civil servantsdo internalise the values of impartiality, honesty,integrity and objectivity, and to a remarkable extent.

Is there any reason to think that people who have beenraised in the ethos, not of the civil service, but of the


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market, will have the commitment to integrity, honesty,objectivity and impartiality that should characterisegovernment service? The behaviour of executives ofcompanies operating in the market such as banks, forexample, is not encouraging. To judge from the amountof mis-selling of financial products, many of themappear to have regarded the ignorance of theircustomers as a resource to be exploited. Bank executiveshave important virtues, including energy, dynamism,managerial ability, entrepreneurial skill and opennessto new ideas. But honesty, integrity and impartialityoften do not appear to be among them.

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Conclusion

Keeping ourgovernment straight

Politicians who have access to the levers of the state’spower are faced with the perennial temptations of usingtheir power to further their own interests or the interestsof their supporters rather than those of the people as a whole. Democratic politicians face this temptation just as much as the tyrants who have seized power byforce or fraud and keep it by using those methods.Democratically-elected politicians know that their holdon power depends on persuading the electorate thattheir policies are bringing about success and prosperity,combined with justice, individual liberty, and not toogreat a degree of inequality. The constant temptation isto pretend that things are going better than they reallyare: to convince the public that all is well, that policiesare having the results they intended, and that ifanything has gone wrong, it is the fault of the last lot.Truth-telling about the effects of the use of politicalpower is essential to the proper working of democracy.But politicians in power are constantly tempted not totell the truth.

That is perhaps the most fundamental reason whyofficials who are politically independent, and who arededicated to providing impartial and objective advice,

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are so important. They are in a position to help preventpoliticians from succumbing to the perennial temptationsof power. Lord Butler, who was cabinet secretary andhead of the home civil service between 1988 and 1998,was unquestionably right when he insisted:

The existence of people who are not beholden toministers for their jobs – ie, non-political civilservants – has lent a great deal to the integrity ofBritish public life… It has been an important part ofkeeping our government straight.1

It has also had an important role in improving policy.It is very easy for politicians, especially ones flushedwith electoral success, to deceive themselves about themerits of their own policies, and to believe that, finally,they have found the answers to the problems that theirpredecessors in office tried but failed to solve. Objectiveand impartial scrutiny of those policies can preventpolicy blunders and it can improve flawed proposals.So can the awareness of what happened last time. Veryfew political ideas are wholly new. Most of them havebeen tried at some point in the past. Permanent officialscan provide what can be a critically important reminderof what experience has demonstrated will be the likelyeffects of implementing a particular policy. To the extentthat they are not doing this at present – and I haveexplained some of the reasons why they are not – it is aserious impediment to good government.

In a democracy, democratically-elected politiciansmust always have the last word. The importance ofimpartial and objective officials who are committed tohonesty and integrity is not that they should be able tostop politicians from doing what they have been electedto do, but that officials should be able to improve

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CONCLuSION: KEEPING OuR GOVERNMENT STRAIGHT


politicians’ policies, and to make it more likely thosepolicies comply with the requirements of legality andconstitutional propriety. This is not a role which thepolitically committed can be expected to fulfil withanything like the same degree of competence. ThePublic Administration Select Committee reports FrancisMaude as saying: ‘You are much more likely to getcandid and often brutal advice from your specialadvisers who have no tenure at all except your will’.2

But that is simply not true. You are not likely to get‘candid and often brutal advice’ from those who shareyour political convictions. They will inevitably fall intothe same traps of wishful thinking that you have.Francis Maude’s assertion is the equivalent of thinkingthat the best person to provide a referee for a footballgame is an individual who is a committed supporter ofone of the two competing teams.

Granting any individual, group or institutioncompletely unconstrained political power is alwaysdangerous: it always carries the risk that those who haveunconstrained power will abuse it. The people aresovereign – but within limits, because we the peoplerecognise that not everything the people vote for shouldbe done immediately, or even at all. Just as the lawrequires that most big purchases now come with amandatory cooling off period, where the individual canthink about whether or not he really wants to spend allthat money on a time-share in Spain, so the policies thathave been ‘bought’ by a majority of the electorate needto be assessed by people who do not already believe thatthey are the right thing to do. That is the function of anindependent civil service: in providing impartial andobjective advice, it increases the chances that policiesthat will later be regretted are not implemented in haste.


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The increasing prevalence of special advisers hascoincided with the arrival of new governments madeup of politicians who lack ministerial experience. SinceMargaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979, the patternhas been for the losing party to spend many years inopposition before regaining power. When Labourfinally won a general election under Tony Blair, in 1997,not a single member of his cabinet had ever previouslyheld cabinet rank. When, 13 years later, Labour wasreplaced by the Conservative-Liberal Democratcoalition led by David Cameron, only two cabinetministers – William Hague and Kenneth Clarke – hadany experience of being in the cabinet. That contrastsstrikingly with the ministers sitting around MrsThatcher’s cabinet table in 1979, eight of whom(including the prime minister herself) had been in thecabinet before, or those around the cabinet table whenLabour won in 1974, nine of whom had been in thecabinet before, or again with the cabinet Edward Heathput together after he won in 1970, in which eightmembers had already held cabinet office.

The lack of ministerial experience amongst themembers of newly-elected governments means theybadly need the advice of civil servants who understandthe administrative machine and what it can, and whatit cannot, do. At the same time, newly appointedministers with no experience of government are leastlikely to take the advice of civil servants. Long periodsin opposition have the effect of heightening a newminister’s suspicion of officials: there is a sense thatthey have been ‘captured’ by the other side, and cannotbe trusted. Being out of office usually reinforces theinexperienced incoming minster’s conviction thatcompromising ideological commitments in order to

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achieve practical and effective policies amounts to adefeatist acceptance of the status quo – which isprecisely what new ministers feel they have beenelected to change. As a consequence, they tend tobelieve that nothing is to be learned from the experienceof civil servants. It is one of the principal reasons whyrecent governments have looked to special advisers,rather than experienced officials, for advice on policy.That outlook does not reverse itself. Once they havebeen in office for a few years, ministers who arrivedthinking that they needed special advisers in order toget around what they originally perceived to berecalcitrant officials do not come to the view that theycan diminish the role of their advisers. Special advisersdo not diminish over time. They only increase.

There are many things wrong with the civil service asit now is, and many things that can be done to improveit. But our government would not improve if its role inproviding objective and impartial assessment of policywas totally supplanted by politically committed specialadvisers. If present trends continue, however, that iswhat will eventually happen. What can be done to stopthe movement towards that destination, or at least toslow it down? Anyone who wishes to diminish the roleplayed by special advisers faces the following problem:it is ministers who have increased the power andnumber of special advisers, and it is ministers alonewho can reduce it. But they think they have no interestat all in doing so. On the contrary, the increasingemphasis in contemporary democratic politics onpresentation and publicity means that ministers, andespecially the prime minister, place ever-greateremphasis on the sort of expertise that special advisers,as opposed to civil servants, provide: the ability to


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anticipate the political effects of making anannouncement, rather than the assessment of the long-term consequences for the country of adopting aparticular policy. This is not an attitude that variesacross members of different political parties. All ofthem, once in office, appear to view the relative meritsof special advisers and civil servants in the same way.

Special advisers are not required to have any trainingfor their role - which is not surprising, because there isnone. Most of them do not have any experience ofgovernment or administration prior to taking their firstjob as an adviser either. Their appointment is entirely inthe gift of the secretary of state of the relevantdepartment: the only fetter on the secretary of state’sdiscretion is the need to secure the agreement of theprime minister. The most effective way – indeed it maybe the only way – to diminish the dangers of replacingthe impartial scrutiny of policy by purely politicaladvice would be to make special advisers more like civilservants: to change the way they are appointed, so thatthere was some form of merit test involved, and torequire that advisers, either as candidates for the job orprior to starting it, undergo compulsory training on theimportance of honesty and integrity in governmentservice, and perhaps on the nature of administrativelaw. It would not be a substitute for imbibing the civilservice ethos, with its traditions of impartiality,integrity, objectivity and honesty. But it would be a start.

It would, however, diminish a minister’s discretion onwho was appointed, a move that would be stronglyresisted. According to a longstanding convention,ministers are responsible for anything done by membersof their department, and are answerable to parliamentfor it. Increasingly, ministers regard this doctrine of

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extensive ministerial responsibility as unfair – andparticularly so if they cannot choose their senior staff,the people who will inevitably in fact make most of thedecisions on how a given policy is implemented or (touse the current jargon) ‘delivered’.

The convention that the act of any civil servant in theirdepartment is ultimately the act of the minister incharge, is resented and is being eroded. Ministers do notnow resign if one of their civil servants is found to havedone something that they feel they have to apologise toparliament for. Senior civil servants, rather than theminister, are now frequently hauled up in front of selectcommittees in order to be held to account for what hasgone wrong with the implementation of a particularpolicy. Ministers would like to be able to make a sharpdistinction between policy and implementation, so thatthey are held responsible for the success of a policy, butnot for the blunders of its implementation.

In reality, this distinction can rarely be made clearlyor cleanly: identifying whether what went wrong wasthe fault of the policy or the way it was implementedfrequently depends on whether you think the policywas a sensible one to adopt in the first place. Theanswer you give to that question almost alwaysdepends on your political convictions.3 That is whybeing able to choose their own political advisers is soimportant to ministers, and why they have exertedincreasing pressure to try to ensure that they can choosetheir own permanent secretaries as well.4

There is a further difficulty with any proposal thataims to make special advisers more like civil servants:as far as ministers are concerned, the whole point ofspecial advisers is that they are not like civil servants.They do not think like them, and they do not act like


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them. The more special advisers become like civilservants – the more they are concerned, not with partypolitical considerations, and with advancing partypolitical projects, but with the provision of objective andimpartial advice, with telling the truth about the likelyeffects of the implementation of a particular policy – theless use they are to ministers. This is why the disputebetween the respective roles of the civil service andspecial advisers is not a cosmetic issue, but afundamental conflict, and one on which, in the end,compromise is more or less impossible – just as it wasbetween Northcote’s and Trevelyan’s vision of what theexecutive arm of government should be like, and thesystem of unmeritocratic, politicised jobbery that theirreport aimed to overthrow.

It should not be impossible to convince our politicalrepresentatives that it is in their, as well as our, intereststo increase the role of the objective and impartial advicein the formation and implementation of policy.Northcote and Trevelyan and their supporters managedto secure enough supporters to defeat the old system,although it took more than 50 years to implement theirreport fully. The trouble is, we the people just don’tseem very concerned about the matter, which leaves thepoliticians free to erode the role of the civil service inproviding impartial advice. It is important that a way isfound to make the electorate aware of how importantmatters of procedure are: failing to get them right willdiminish the quality of government, and therefore thequality of life, in our country. And we need to do itquickly, before the process of dismantling the civilservice as Northcote, Trevelyan and their successorsconceived it has become irreversible.

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Bibliography

1. Parliamentary and government reports

‘Defining the Boundaries within the Executive: Ministers, SpecialAdvisers and the permanent Civil Service’, Committee on Standardsin Public Life (Wicks Committee), 2003. Oral and written evidence.

Report of the Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional RenewalBill, Volume II, 2008.

Committee on Public Administration, Session 2003-2003: minutes of evidence.

The Leveson Inquiry: Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press, 2012.Report and evidence.

House of Lords Debates, Hansard.

‘Special Advisers: Boon or Bane?’, House of Commons PublicAdministration Select Committee, 2001.

‘These unfortunate Events’, House of Commons PublicAdministration Select Committee, 2002.

‘Special advisers in the thick of it’, House of Commons PublicAdministration Select Committee, 2012.

‘Truth to power: how Civil Service reform can succeed’, House ofCommons Public Administration Select Committee, 2013.

‘The accountability of civil servants’, House of Lords ConstitutionCommittee, 2012.

2. Books and articles

Acemoglu, Daron, and Robinson, James A., Why Nations Fail: TheOrigins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, London: Profile, 2013.

Barber, Michael, Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to Transform Britain’sPublic Services, London: Methuen, 2008.

Blair, Tony, speech on modernisation of the civil service, 24 February2004.

Blick, Andrew, People Who Live in the Dark, London: Politico’s, 2004.

Crewe, Ivor, ‘Fit-for-purpose Whitehall’, Reform, 2014.

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Cummings, Dominic, ‘The hollow men II: Some reflections onWestminster and Whitehall dysfunction’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog,30 October 2014 .

Cusick, James, ‘Dump f***ing everyone: The inside story of howMichael Gove’s vicious attack dogs are terrorising the DfE’, TheIndependent, 15 February 2013.

Diamond, Patrick, ‘Governing as New Labour: An Inside Account ofthe Blair and Brown Years’, Political Studies Review (Vol 9, Issue 2), 8April 2011.

Harris, Josh, ‘One direction: first accounting officer ministerialdirection published since 2010’, Institute for Government, 2015.

Hennessy, Peter, Whitehall, London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1989.

Heywood, Jeremy, and Kerslake, Bob, ‘Tribute to Baroness Thatcher’,The Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2013.

Hillman, Nick, In Defence of Special Advisers: Lessons from PersonalExperience, Institute for Government, 2014.

King, Anthony, and Crewe, Ivor, The Blunders of Our Governments,London: Oneworld, 2013.

Lankester, Tim, The Politics and Economics of Britain’s Foreign Aid: ThePergau Dam Affair, London: Routledge, 2013.

Letwin, Oliver, ‘Why mandarins matter’, Institute for Government,2012.

Maude, Francis, ‘Ministers and mandarins: Speaking truth untopower’, Policy Exchange, 5 June 2013.

Miller, Joel, ‘Profiling Populations Available for Stops and Searches’,Home Office, Police Research Series Paper 131, 2000.

Miller, Joel, Quinton, P., and Bland, N., ‘Police stops and searches:lessons from a programme of research’, Home Office, Briefing Note,2000.

Miller, Joel, Bland, N., and Quinton, P., ‘The Impact of Stops andSearches on Crime and the Community’, Home Office, PoliceResearch Series Paper 127, 2000.

Mountfield, Robin, ‘“Politicisation” and the Civil Service: A note’,Civil Servant, 2002.

Powell, Jonathan, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in theModern World, London: Vintage, 2011.

Quinton, P., Bland, N., and Miller, J., ‘Police Stops, Decision-makingand Practice’, Home Office, Police Research Series Paper 130, 2000.

‘Shriti Vadera: A profile of the Business Minister nicknamed “Shritithe Shriek”‘, The Daily Telegraph, 15 January 2009.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY


Sisson, C.H., The Spirit of British Administration and Some EuropeanComparisons, London: Faber & Faber, 1959.

Slack, Becky, ‘A sense of direction’, Civil Service World, 28 March 2012.

Stratton, Allegra, ‘Francis Maude attacks Civil Service over jobdocument’, BBC News, 7 July 2014.

Sumption, Jonathan, ‘Judicial and political decision-making: Theuncertain boundary’, F.A. Mann Lecture, Lincoln’s Inn, 2011.

Terzi, Alessio, ‘Corruptionomics in Italy: Why and how fightingcorruption matters for economic growth’, Breugel, 22 May 2015.

Waddington, P. A. J., Stenson, K., and Don, D., ‘In proportion: race,and police stop and search’, British Journal of Criminology 44 (pp.889-914), 2004.

Wilkes, Giles, ‘The unelected Lynchpin: Why Government NeedsSpecial Advisers’, Institute for Government, 2014.

Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge universityPress, 1981.

Wilson, Harold, The Governance of Britain, London: Weidenfeld &Nicholson, 1976.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M.Anscombe: Oxford: Blackwell, 1976.

Yong, Ben, and Hazell, Robert, Special Advisers: Who they are, what theydo, and why they matter, Oxford: Hart, 2014.


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Notes

Introduction: No Sir Humphrey

1 Acemoglu and Robinson, in Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power,Prosperity and Poverty, provide a persuasive survey.

2 The phrase is Oliver Letwin’s. See his extremely clear and mostlypersuasive speech to the Institute of Government, ‘WhyMandarins Matter’. Letwin is Conservative MP for West Dorset.He was appointed chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 2014.He has overall responsibility for the Cabinet Office, and advisesthe prime minister on the implementation of government policy.

3 I was alerted to this by Lord Saatchi’s speech to the Lords, 1 May2002.

4 ‘The accountability of civil servants’, House of Lords ConstitutionCommittee, Evidence, p.135.

5 For an idea of the appalling effects of a corrupt bureaucracy in adeveloped European economy, see Alessio Terzi on Italy:‘Corruptionomics in Italy: Why and How Fighting CorruptionMatters for Economic Growth’. He quotes a statistic from theItalian Court of Auditors, which estimates that for large publicworks, corruption amounts to as much as 40 per cent of totalpublic procurement value.

1. Impartiality, objectivity, honesty and integrity

1 Yong and Hazell, in Special Advisers: Who they are, what they do, andwhy they matter, provide many quotations from ministers andothers to support their assertion that ‘special advisers havebecome an established part of British government: ministerscannot now imagine doing without them’.

2 Clarke, Charles, evidence to Committee on Standards in PublicLife, 9 July 2002, paragraph 2383.

3 Maude, ‘Ministers and mandarins: Speaking truth unto power’.

4 Letwin, ‘Why mandarins matter’. He did not give any examplesof civil servants successfully delaying, and thereby defeating, theimplementation of an elected government’s policies. AlthoughLetwin’s assertion is one of those claims that is generally accepted

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by politicians, it is in fact quite hard to come up with concretecases of successful civil service obstruction. Michael Barber, whowas appointed by Tony Blair to oversee the implementation ofNew Labour’s policies, first in the Department for Education, andthen across Whitehall, maintains that civil servants at theDepartment for Education resisted putting into practice Labour’sidea that central government should have the power to intervenedirectly in poorly performing education authorities. Theirresistance was not successful. See his Instruction to Deliver, p.313.It is rather easier to find instances when civil servants failed evento try to prevent ministers from implementing what turned outto be a disastrous policy: the most obvious case is the poll tax.

5 Sisson, The Spirit of British Administration and Some EuropeanComparisons, p.143.

6 ‘Truth to power: how Civil Service reform can succeed’, House ofCommons Public Administration Select Committee Evidence,p.47.

7 Wilson, The Governance of Britain, pp.202-205.

8 Blick, A., People Who Live in the Dark, chapter 2, pp.30-63, providesa good account of Wilson’s experiment with special advisers.

9 Wilson, The Governance of Britain, p.204.

10 Blick, People Who Live in the Dark, p.57

11 Yong and Hazell, Special Advisers, chapter 3, pp.35-60.

12 Evidence to the Lords Constitution Committee, 18 July 2012,response to Q357 from Lord Crickhowell.

13 Stratton, ‘Francis Maude attacks Civil Service over job document’.

2. ‘This is shit’: The marginalisation of civil servants

1 It has been put to me that several secretaries of state institutedthe practice that no advice should be put to them until theirspecial advisers have commented on it and re-worked it so thatit complies with political imperatives. I cannot find anythingwhich formally orders or even records that practice – but that isnot surprising, since it is an informal process, rather than onemandated by government policy.

2 Mountfield, ‘“Politicisation” and the Civil Service: A note’.

3 Evidence to the Joint Committee on the Draft ConstitutionalRenewal Bill, Vol II, p.201.

4 Evidence to the Joint Committee of the Houses of Parliament onthe Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill, Vol II, p.193, 10 June 2008.

5 House of Commons Liaison Committee, 16 July 2002, response toQ8 from Tony Wright.


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6 House of Lords Debate, 7 November 2005. Alastair Campbell hadby then retired, leaving only Powell with explicitly grantedexecutive authority.

7 Written evidence submitted to Public Administration SelectCommittee for report ‘Special advisers in the thick of it’.

8 ‘Special Advisers: Boon or Bane?’, Public Administration SelectCommittee, par 61.

9 Ibid, p.96.

10 Michael Jacobs, ‘Special Advisers in the thick of it’, House ofCommons Public Administration, Written Evidence.

11 Paul Richards, ‘The accountability of civil servants’, House ofLords Constitution Committee, Oral Evidence, 20 June 2012.

12 Ibid, p.96.

13 Powell, The New Machiavelli, p.21.

14 ‘These unfortunate Events’, Public Administration SelectCommittee.

15 ‘Defining the Boundaries within the Executive: Ministers, SpecialAdvisers and the permanent Civil Service’, Committee onStandards in Public Life, p.236, pars 2762-2767. Lord Wilson’scircumspection may be explained by the fact that, as he said atpar 2744: ‘I am here to represent the government’.

16 ‘Shriti Vadera’s fierce reputation earned her the nickname “Shritithe Shriek”‘, The Daily Telegraph.

17 Cusick, ‘Dump f***ing everyone: The inside story of how MichaelGove’s vicious attack dogs are terrorising the DfE’.

18 ‘The accountability of civil servants’, House of Lords ConstitutionCommittee, p.65.

19 Hillman, In Defence of Special Advisers, pp.18-19.

20 Cummings, ‘The hollow men II: Some reflections on Westminsterand Whitehall dysfunction’, p.9.

21 House of Lords Debates, 7 November 2005, Hansard Column 490.

22 Report of the Joint Committee on the Draft ConstitutionalRenewal Bill, Volume II, par 20.

23 The exchange between Richards and Powell is to be found onp.104 of ‘The accountability of civil servants’, House of LordsConstitution Committee.

24 Hillman, In Defence of Special Advisers, p16.

25 Joint Committee on the Constitutional Reform Bill, Evidence,p.207.

26 Wilkes, The Unelected Lynchpin.

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NOTES


27 Leveson Inquiry, Witness Statement of Jonathan Stephens, par 26;Jonathan Stephens oral evidence, 25 May 2012, afternoon session,page 29 lines 13 and 14.

28 Lord Hart in ‘The accountability of civil servants’, House of LordsConstitution Committee, Evidence, p.25; Charles Clarke’scomment is on pp.64-65.

29 Sir Jeremy Heywood’s letter is quoted in ‘Special Advisers in thethick of it’, House of Commons Public Administration SelectCommittee, paragraph 27. The report has a very clear summaryof the reasons for Adam Smith’s resignation.

30 Quoted in Yong and Hazell, Special Advisers, p.175.

3. The new Machiavellis and the job of the court

1 It is reprinted in Williams, Moral Luck.


3 It is striking that Powell does not make telling the truth to thepublic the ‘first requirement’ of ‘a member of the court’ – bywhich he means any official working directly to the primeminister inside Number 10. The first requirement for that role, hesays, is ‘loyalty and confidentiality’ (The New Machiavelli, p.84).This may well be good advice for political effectiveness, which isPowell’s concern. It does now, however, reflect the sort ofpriorities that we as citizens want public officials to have.

4 ‘A Sense of Direction’, Civil Service World, and Harris, ‘Onedirection: first accounting officer ministerial direction publishedsince 2010’.

5 Evidence to Lords Constitution Committee, 23 May 2012, p.21.

6 Hennessy, Whitehall. See especially the chapter entitled ‘TheThatcher Effect’, which provides a good account of whathappened, with references.

7 Quoted in Sir Jeremy Heywood and Sir Bob Kerslake’s Tribute toBaroness Thatcher, The Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2013. Lord(Norman) Fowler’s experience may have followed the sametrajectory as Mrs Thatcher’s. He told the Lords ConstitutionCommittee that, in spite of being ‘a member of the most radicalgovernment since Attlee’s’, he ‘never at any stage found anyproblem with the civil service in developing, implementing andputting forward those policies… In the main, it was a Rolls-Roycemachine, and I think we would be mad to turn our back on it’.Evidence to Lords Constitution Committee, ‘The accountabilityof civil servants’, p.41.


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8 Diamond, ‘Governing as New Labour: An Inside Account of theBlair and Brown Years’, p.151; Powell, The New Machiavelli, p.148.The quotation on Gordon Brown comes from Crewe and King,Blunders of Our Governments, pp.259-60.

9 Blair, speech on modernisation of the civil service.

10 Lord Butler’s idea that political advisers ‘should no longer beclassified be as civil servants’ but rather ‘treated like politicaladvisers to opposition parties’ would have the great merit ofending the confusion. He has made the suggestion several timessince 2002. No government has seen fit to take up his proposal.See his written evidence to Public Administration SelectCommittee in ‘Special advisers in the thick of it’.

11 King and Crewe, Blunders of Our Governments, p.335.

12 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston emphasised this in his evidence tothe Wicks Committee, 18 September 2002, p.287, par 3323.


14 ‘Truth to power: how Civil Service reform can succeed’, House ofCommons Public Administration Select Committee, Evidence,Q1048, p.185.



17 Quinton, et al, ‘Police Stops, Decision-making and Practice’; Milleret al, ‘The Impact of Stops and Searches on Crime and theCommunity’; Miller et al, ‘Profiling Populations Available forStops and Searches’; Miller et al, ‘Police stops and searches:lessons from a programme of research’; Waddington et al, ‘Inproportion: race, and police stop and search’.

4. The patronage virus and incompetent government

1 ‘The accountability of civil servants’, Lords ConstitutionCommittee, par 34.

2 The latest guidance from the Civil Service Commission on theappointment of permanent secretaries dates from December 2012.It emphasises that the prime minister has the final word on theappointment of any permanent secretary.

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NOTES


3 Chambers, Joshua, ‘Maude set to announce move to “extendedministerial offices”‘, Civil Service World, 10 July 2013; Elliott,Francis, ‘Nicky Morgan faces battles with the teachingestablishment over the next round of school reforms’, The Times,21 July 2015.

4 ‘The accountability of civil servants’, Lords ConstitutionCommittee, Evidence, p.231.

5 Michael Jacobs, written evidence in ‘Special Advisers in the thickof it’, Public Administration Select Committee.

6 The incident is comprehensively analysed in The Politics andEconomics of Britain’s Foreign Aid: The Pergau Dam Affair, by TimLankester, who was the permanent secretary at the time. LordSumption discusses the Appeal Court’s decision in ‘Judicial andPolitical Decision-Making: The uncertain Boundary’, FA MannLecture, 2011.

7 Crewe, ‘Fit-For-Purpose Whitehall’, p.87.

8 Margaret Hodge, evidence to Lords Constitution Committee, 23May 2012, ‘The accountability of civil servants’, p.13.

9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, par 265, p.94.

Conclusion: Keeping our government straight

1 Evidence to Public Administration Select Committee, 19 June2003.

2 House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, par21, p.27. It gives as a reference ‘Ministers and Mandarins:speaking truth unto power’, Maude’s speech to Policy Exchange.But I cannot find the phrase in that speech. In the speech, Maudesays: ‘Good ministers want bright knowledgeable officials whowill give the most brutally candid advice.’

3 The Lords Constitution Committee illustrates this point, andprovides evidence, in ‘The accountability of civil servants’.

4 It was originally part of the Conservatives’ plan to reform the civilservice that the appointment of a permanent secretary should betaken out of the hands of the Civil Service Commission and givento the secretary of state. There was a great deal of opposition tothat idea. The compromise was that the secretary of state shouldhave a veto on any candidate put up by the commission –although in practice, he or she already has one, and has done formany years.


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Jonathan Lindsell

CIVITAS£9.00

CIVITAS Institute for the Study of Civil Society

55 Tufton Street, London, SW1P 3QL Tel: 020 7799 6677

Email: [email protected] Web: www.civitas.org.uk

ISBN 978-1-906837-73-0 Cover design: lukejefford.com

N o-one in power has announced it. No-one in power has even admitted

it. But the actions of successive governments have been to downgrade

and marginalise objective civil service advice, and to replace it with

counsel from politically committed special advisers.’

The special adviser – or ‘spad’ – has become firmly established in Westminster

folklore over the past two decades, coming to symbolise much that is questionable

about modern politics. The likes of Jo Moore, who urged colleagues to use 9/11

to bury bad news, and Damian McBride, who schemed on behalf of Gordon

Brown against members of his own cabinet, have lent the Whitehall caricatures

of the television comedy The Thick of It more than a veneer of credibility.

But the implications for government of this growing cadre of politically-motivated

apparatchiks are no joke, extending well beyond the chicanery of a few high-

profile figures. In this excoriating account of contemporary government, Alasdair

Palmer – who has worked up close with spads in the Home Office and spent

years documenting Whitehall machinations as a journalist – portrays the return

of political patronage to the highest levels of our public administration.

It is a phenomenon that the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the mid-19th century

were meant to banish, and one which now threatens Britain’s rare and precious

heritage of relatively efficient, relatively uncorrupt government.

‘The practice of good government in Britain has not been lost – yet. But it is

changing, and in ways which could eventually lead to the disappearance of

impartial scrutiny of government policy by civil service officials.’

Alasd

air Palm

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Alasdair Palmer

CIVITAS

How special advisers are taking over from civilservants and why we need to worry about it


civitas the return of political patronage · the return of political patronage how special advisers...

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