Civil Service: Politicisation

Lord Mandelson Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mandelson (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Butler, on introducing what is a very important topic for debate. I hold him in the highest esteem. Indeed, when I first became a Minister in the Cabinet Office in 1997, I felt as if I ended up, in effect, working for him, rather than the other way round.

When my grandfather left government in the 1950s and went to Nuffield College—a great college in a very great university—he wrote and published Government and Parliament: A survey from the inside. For him, good government boiled down to

“an intelligent Minister who knows what he or she wants, commanding the understanding, co-operation and support of his civil servants.”

“Intelligent” and “commanding” are the operative words. We need lots of Ministers who are like that—people who can both direct and drive government with a real sense of purpose.

But good Ministers also need good, seasoned and sometimes more specialist advisers in order to do their jobs. When I was a Minister, my principal political advisers were actually my civil servants, not because I was politicising them in any way in a party sense, but because they were there to explain things and to warn and caution me about the policies I was developing and implementing. I want to stress that they welcomed the one or two additional advisers I recruited to my department. Indeed, they found them indispensable, as did I, because they often introduced an important external dimension to the work we were undertaking. So I do not share the view that a Minister, or even a Prime Minister, bringing in an appointee should be seen in any way as a sinister move—that they are incapable of serving the national interest. In that category I would firmly place Jonathan Powell, at the heart of whose work is his belief in and desire to serve the national interest.

So, while I understand the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Butler—and no doubt Labour may make, by the way, the occasional mistake—I think he is at best overstating them and at worst being slightly unfair to some of the individuals he has named, and to the processes that have brought them to their jobs. I feel very deeply that there will not be anything like the systematic undermining of the Civil Service that we have seen in recent years: when half a dozen Permanent Secretaries were fired at the whim of Prime Ministers Johnson and Truss; when ingratiation was being encouraged as the route to career advancement; when “Not one of us” was a bar to promotion; when individual public appointments were scrutinised for loyalty to Brexit; and when government policy was conducted by private What’s App, rather than on properly considered Civil Service advice.

I pay tribute to the many senior and junior civil servants who withstood the pressure they were under. In particular, I agree that we should record our thanks to the outgoing Cabinet Secretary, Sir Simon Case, who put up with so much, including endless attempts by Ministers to denigrate and demoralise the Civil Service for no better reason than to disguise their own ineptitude. This was the true and unacceptable politicisation we never want to see again. I have every faith that the new Cabinet Secretary will be able to work closely with the Prime Minister and his colleagues to ensure that British government recovers its reputation and, once again, becomes the envy of the world.