LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
'Afutonomy for Government Departments ?
SIR,—In his review published in the issue of May 29th of Sir Walford Selby's book Diplomatic Twilight, Sir Charles Webster seems to me to have overlooked the vital fact that the late Mr. Neville Chamberlain's use of Sir Horace Wilson as principal adviser on foreign affairs came as the culmination of a process which had begun with the issue of the Treasury Minute of 1919, whereby the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Treasury was given the designation of official Head of the Civil Service.
What Sir Walford has written can, of course, be taken as a personal attack upon the holder of that designation, though 1 for one read into it a criticism of a system rather than of named individuals. No one will deny that Sir Warren Fisher was one of the most out- standing figures that the Civil Service has ever produced, but it is hnportant to recall that so long as Sir Austen Chamberlain was at the Foreign Office, very little usurpation by Sir Warren of powers normally and only exercised by the Foreign Secretary and the Permanent Under- Secretary of the Foreign Office was permitted. With Sir Austen's departure from the Foreign Office, however, Sir Warren's power over that Department considerably increased, perhaps because the subse- quent Foreign Secretaries were not fully aware of the enormous power that the right to .recommend automatically gave over appoint- ments in that Department.
Sir James Grigg in his book Prejudice and Judgment has shown that it was not until well into the 1930's that Sir Warren Fisher under- went a "sea-change" so far as rearmament was concerned. From what I have seen of public service, it would not be very surprising if those who owed their promotion to Sir Warren's recominendations had registered a similar change about the same time. All who served in the Regular Forces at that time will remember how long after the rise of Hitler " the ten year rule " remained in force.
To my mind, one of the most serious defects in our present machinery of Government that comes to light in Sir Walford's book is the enormous reliance which members of the Cabinet have to place upon the permanent officials responsible for selecting from the despatches coming in from our representatives abroad those items which arc of such importance that they demand immediate attention at the highest level. Those selections must largely depend upon the policy which the responsible official deems it his duty to follow, and on Austria alone Sir Walford's book makes it quite clear that the policy which some officials of the Foreign Office were pursuing was very different to that which Sir Watford had himself been instructed to pursue in Vienna. .
We may therefore be,sloubly thankful that Mr. Eden was able to carry out the long-recommended and long-resisted reforms of 1944 whereby the Foreign Office was made separate from the home Civil Service, It is, however, disturbing to realise that the system which those reforms rectified could still be operated with disastrous effect over the Defence Departments, if the powers which that system gives were again to be exercised in other fields, as they sometimes were in
Foreign' Affairs.—Yours faithfully, H. LEGGE-BOURKE.
House of Commons, S.W.I.
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