Running behind the Civil Service
Patrick Cosgrave
Did you know that Attlee believed the third Marquis of Salisbury to be the best Prime Minister qua Prime Minister since he first took an interest in politics'? Did you know that, in the early days of the Heath government, Mrs Thatcher sat in the very same chair in the Cabinet room as had been occupied by Mrs Castle in the previous administration ? Did you know that its legs had been specially encased in cretonne because Mrs Castle 'complained that her hose had been laddered'? Did you know that Mr Harold Wilson, fearing that a sacked Minister (unnamed) would refuse to accept his dismissal, once humbly asked the Queen's advisers whether he had the right to fire the wretch ? (He was told that he had.) If you did not know these inconsequential facts, and it you would like to know a great many more like them, then you cannot do better than read Sir Harold Wilson's new book.* If, on the other hand, you want to learn something about how Britain is governed, if you want to understand the inanition of our system and the consequences of it, then you would do far better to sit down with Mr Nigel Lawson and Mr Jock Bruce-Gardyne's brilliant monograph, The Power Game.
On the face of it, that is an extraordinary statement. Mr Lawson is a Conservative backbencher, Mr Bruce-Gardyne was once one. They are both articulate, pushing, perhaps even arrogant men. But neither has ever held office. Neither has had the opporunity to see how government works from the inside. Certainly, no amount of research, no quantity of conversation with ministers, ex-ministers or civil servants could give them a vantage-point as good as Sir Harold's. Yet they have a great deal to say about British politics that is instructive; he has nothing to offer but endless triviality.
It is tempting to explain the paradox by reference to the different characters of the three men. A book by Sir Harold is rather like a conversation with him—prolix, paranoiac, seemingly endless, but with, here and there, a nugget of humour. He is endlessly tugging at the sleeve of his interlocutor or reader, promising to open the interminable corridors of his mind and display to an astonished eye the dusty treasures reposing therein. But when the doors have been opened, when the dust has been removed, how pinchbeck are the goodies. On this or that occasion Attlee (who is mentioned in the new book almost as often as its author)
said something or other—usually banal. Now and then during Sir Harold's premiership indeterminate numbers of anonymous colleagues sought to depose him—the fact that the names of the dissident living are rarely given deprives The Governance of Britain of even the scandalous spice of the Crossman diaries. And while Sir Harold doesn't think Bagehot was wholly right about the workings of the constitution, he .doesn't think he was wholly wrong either.
Mr Lawson and Mr Bruce-Gardyne are, of course, younger. They are much less seamed by experience. They are both of what might be called the New Right, the body of young men and women who, starting in the mid-'sixties, have wholly revolutionised the thinking and the intellectual image of the Conservative Party. They are counter-revolutionaries in the strict sense of the term, believing not only that it is not necessary to accept the growing dominance of the machine of state over the life of the nation, but that it is possible to devise policies to that dominance, and to hand control of our affairs back to politicians freely chosen by the people.
In The Power Game, though, their ambitions and ideas are subordinated to their scholarship. They examine, microscopically, four important decisions of the nineteensixties—the building of Concorde, the 1961 and 1967 approaches to the EEC, the abolition of Retail Price Maintenance, and the resistance to the devaluation of the pound between 1964 and 1967. Three depressing conclusions may be drawn from the narrative—that the political issues which create most heat often have very little influence on the destiny of the nation; that it has proved very difficult for even senior politicians in the recent past to overcome or reverse the deadening consensus of Whitehall once that consensus has emerged; and that British politicians since 1961 have demonstrated very little ability to distinguish what is important in decision-making from what is trivial.
However, the temptation to explain the difference between the two books by describing different men should be resisted. The truth of the matter is that there is a British political sickness which lurks behind every paragraph of The Power Game, and which stands forth in its most virulent fors) in The Governance of Britain. It is the love of the politician for the machine.
If inchoate, if invariably wrong, if every day incorrect both about what people want and about what is good for them, the machine of the British state—and the top third of this iceberg, the Civil Service exercises an endless charm for that hundred or so Members of Parliament who at arlY given moment hold ministerial office. The two men who have dominated British politics and government in the last decade Mr Edward Heath and Sir Harold—alike fell victim to its fascination. To each one the activity of being Prime Minister was the summation of existence. How else can one explain the blunting of Sir Harold's earlY radicalism; or the fact that Mr Heath—who is seen at his most admirably bloodyminded in the Lawson/Bruce-Gardyhe chapter on the abolition of Retail Price Maintenance—having come into office in 1970 to shake the country up, ended, with the assiduous aid of Lord Armstrong, bY shaking it down ?
Mr Lawson and Mr Bruce-Gardyne explain with commendable detachment how British government has worked. Sir Harold testifies to his love of how it works. All that is incidental appears in his pages; little that is of any real consequence is therein described. So, by and large, has it been for the great majority of politicians who have found themselves in charge of a Department of State since 1955. Each enters through the front door of office spouting the orders he is about to give; and leaves by the back issuing the platitudes he has learned.
In part—again, as The Power Game makes
clear—some of this is because British pollticians are hard-working folk, and the bur den of paper and of administration with which every minister is loaded down makes it increasingly difficult, as the days and weeks and months of office go by, to remember the original political goal, or distinguish it froal the hundreds of well-nigh irrelevant decisions which have to be made each daY.. What becomes clear, though, is this, that if the steady decline of the nation is to he arrested political leaders must come, not to love, but to hate, the machine of state; t° make the Civil Service truly servants, and not masters.
In our time only Churchill really did that. I remember a distinguished soldier once telling me how he was converted to devotion to Churchill one afternoon shortly after the great man had become Prime Minister. At three-forty in the afternoon,' he said„. 'I saw a Permanent Under-Secretary of, State in a corridor in Whitehall, running. Sir Harold did not make the technicians of the machine of state run: he ran with them. If they are called upon, I trust Mr Lawson and Mr Bruce-Gardyne will do the better job, as they have written the better book.
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