I f Boris Johnson wins the contest to become Mayor of
London on 1 May, he will not inherit an impartial civil service of the sort to which British national politicians are accustomed. There has only been one Mayor of London so far and he, Ken Livingstone, has made sure that London officials reflect his views. So if Boris wins, he will immediately be confronted by the politically motivated hostility of the bureaucracy. It is good to know that he promises to deal with this, less good to hear that he proposes to keep on leading figures like the commissioner of Transport for London, Peter Hendy. The left-wing Mr Hendy is the author of the unloved ‘bendy’ buses, and fires off splenetic letters if anyone dares to criticise the abolition of the muchloved Routemaster. In one of these, he made clear his politics by attacking the Conservatives over transport and praising the ‘progressive Mayor’ (Ken). He is one of those annoying people who wish to be prolier-than-thou — talking about how he used to be a bus conductor, although he is a university graduate, the grandson of an hereditary peer, and the £3.8 million beneficiary of a bus company privatisation. He has had it all his own way in the Ken years, and will not take kindly to Tory rule. If it happens, the Boris mayoralty will be studied as the model for how the Tories will govern big cities. Boris’s toughness or weakness about appointments will shape that model within his first week in City Hall.
AWhitehall mole sends me a bold email by Jonathan Baume, the general secretary of the First Division Association, the trade union of the top civil servants, to his members. Mr Baume complains about the jargon, meaninglessness and disregard for practical administrative experience now rife in government. He quotes the following job advertisement placed in the Sunday Times at the beginning of the year by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It is for an ‘Enterprise Architect’: ‘You’ll be the Department’s chief architect, responsible for making sure that all enterprise architect activities are performed properly. The aim is to optimise our business success, by making sure that only DCSF strategies and relevant trends inform our processes and systems. In fact, you’ll define the entire enterprise architecture process across the Department, ensuring it is well integrated with other related business processes. For this, you’ll need considerable expertise in at least two information and technology disciplines in a multi-tier environment. Alternatively, you could be an authority on business analysis or strategic planning. Either way, you’ll be a respected leader with in-depth knowledge of holistic enterprise architecture; business re-engineering principles and processes; and the politics involved.’ Ah yes, ‘the politics involved’.
On a similar subject, did you know that the Foreign Office’s counterterrorism department has a ‘Grievances and Counter-Narrative Team’ which employs at least six people? Now that you do, do you sleep more soundly in your bed?
In the row about the charitable status of independent schools, I think I understand — though I do not agree with — the idea that ‘public benefit’ must be defined only by what is available to people without money, rather than by the provision of education in itself. What I do not understand is why helping state schools should be considered a charitable activity. In her latest interview, Dame Suzi Leather, the head of the Charity Commission, encourages private schools to ‘let state schools use their facilities’, and chat to the local state head teacher ‘about the most useful things to do’. Partnership with state schools can indeed be a very good thing — though many state schools resist it fiercely — but why should charity be given to a state institution? Surely that is what taxpayers’ money is for? Help the children, by all means, but not the schools. Dame Suzi makes a further point which chillingly answers all those who, fed up with her new definition of ‘public benefit’, advocate that independent schools should end their charitable status and become businesses. In law, they can’t. As Dame Suzi puts it, ‘The law does not allow a school to walk away from being a charity and take assets with it. We can take those charitable assets and redistribute them.’ So your charitableness can be redefined, and then your assets can be sequestrated if you object to this redefinition. It is a stealthy form of nationalisation.
It often takes years of looking at a public monument before you recognise its strengths and weaknesses. The memorial to ‘The Women of World War II’ in Whitehall, erected three years ago, invites comparison with Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph, a few yards on towards Parliament Square. It is only after walking past many, many times that I have realised quite how clumsy and awkward is the new monument and how subtle and moving the old. The new one has bronzes of women’s uniforms hanging lumpily from it, almost like strange-shaped corpses pinned to a wall. The Cenotaph, perhaps because of its ‘entasis’, by which the verticals are not, in fact, straight lines, but slight curves, is very graceful. The stone is very simple, yet somehow it soars. The women’s memorial just squats.
Following my mention last week of my son’s Upper Crust Theory of toast, bread etc., which is that it tastes much better if whatever spread is on it is inserted into the mouth upside down, I hear from Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles. He tells me, politely, that the theory is not original. He draws my attention to the example of his great-great-uncle E.A. Bowles, known as the Crocus King and often considered the greatest amateur gardener of the first half of the 20th century. During the war, Bowles had to reduce his indoor staff to three, but his new butler, Coombs, was famous in those trying times for his ability to cut wafer-thin bread and butter into tiny squares. This enabled the Crocus King, a lifelong Upper-Cruster, to post them into his mouth upside down without mishap. The question for modern times, however, remains: how can the Upper Crust Theory be safely put into practice for those without indoor staff?
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