The Economic Liberal Crusades III: The Reconstruction of the Civil Service

Abstract

‘The sheer professionalism of the British Civil Service, which allows Governments to come and go with a minimum of dislocation and a maximum of efficiency, is something other countries with different systems have every cause to envy.’ At least in writing those words, Mrs Thatcher1 spared her readers, and for that matter the officials themselves, the platitude that Britain had the best Civil Service in the world. In terms of career Civil Services, Britain had one of the two most impressive such Services in the world, the other being that of France, and, since the governance of ‘Europe’ tended to be conducted in accord with French administrative culture as well as that country’s interests, the British Higher Civil Service had an unenviable task in conducting the relevant negotiations. When it came to running Britain itself, as one of their number, Sir Roy Denman, recorded with regret, the days when, at least he believed, higher civil servants were ‘the real, albeit shadowy, rulers of the land’ did not survive Mrs Thatcher becoming Prime Minister. She undermined ‘the bowler hated barons of Whitehall who had discreetly run the country’s affairs’, with it supposedly being the case that though she was on good terms with a few civil servants, mostly those who became her acolytes … for the most part she despised them. Her heroes were those who earned huge salaries in the City; those who worked for the State were by definition second-raters … The Civil Service found itself openly and publicly despised by its political masters and told that the role of the most senior was that of courtier … The quality of their advice suffered. So did the quality of the Service.