Civil Service: Politicisation

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this debate secured by the noble Lord, Lord Butler. He is the living embodiment of what a politically neutral civil servant should be.

I bring a particular and slightly odd perspective to this question because, like most journalists, I had far more professional experience of politicians than of civil servants. This changed when I began work on the biography of Mrs Thatcher because, in order to see the relevant government papers not yet released, I was positively vetted as if I were a civil servant—I was not, I hasten to say, paid from the public purse. I spent nearly 15 years inspecting those papers in the Treasury. My titular boss was Sue Gray, of blessed memory. I learned then how preposterous are the claims made by some politicians that civil servants just get in the way. No Government Minister could work effectively for a single day without the careful attentions of professional civil servants. Politicians inevitably know little about process, yet government cannot function without process.

I also saw, from studying those papers, what great civil servants can achieve. Perhaps the finest surviving exemplars of such public servants, whose apogee was the 1980s, are the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and the noble Lord, Lord Powell of Bayswater, who I do not think is present. The former was Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary, and later her Cabinet Secretary. The latter was her Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, although that title does not do justice to his extraordinary role. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, revealed to me that there came a point when the two men, though friends, were so much at odds that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, tried to shift the noble Lord, Lord Powell, from his post and pack him off to a foreign embassy.

In the careers of these two remarkable men, so well recorded by the very high standard of written communication that existed in the Civil Service at that time, can be traced the necessary tensions of Civil Service life: between the needs of neutrality and propriety on the one hand, which the noble Lord, Lord Butler, rightly sought to uphold as Cabinet Secretary, and, on the other, the enforcement of the authority of the Prime Minister, which the noble Lord, Lord Powell, as a vital private secretary, rightly sought to advance. Thanks to them and many like them—some present in this Chamber today—a balance was achieved, and we were as a result well governed.

I support the spirit of the noble Lord’s Motion, but where I differ from him, if only in emphasis, is that I fear the neutrality of the Civil Service is today compromised not only by politicians but by the Civil Service itself—only the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has raised this so far. Things have happened that would never have happened in the days of the noble Lords, Lord Butler, Lord Wilson of Dinton and Lord Turnbull.

The Civil Service has politicised itself in several ways. I have time to mention only one, but it speaks for many others. In the summer of 2020, after the tragic killing of George Floyd, many government departments decided—through Permanent Secretaries, not Ministers —to take a view. At the Ministry of Justice, the Permanent Secretary, Sir Richard Heaton, declared that

“racism takes many forms; that privilege takes many forms. It’s why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important”.

Similar thoughts emerged from the Department for Education, the Ministry of Defence and elsewhere in Whitehall. BLM hashtags often appeared on officials’ communications. BLM was not then, and is not now, at all politically neutral. It is a hard-left organisation committed to defunding the police and the propagation of racist attitudes towards white people—yet British officialdom metaphorically took the knee. This was a collective abnegation of neutrality, and it was unrebuked by the Cabinet Secretary.

The senior Civil Service has increased its numbers by 64% since 2012—not to the public benefit. It fusses about pronouns at the bottom of emails, but its understanding of the grammar of good government has markedly declined. Comparable accusations may be made against politicians, often rightly, but to debate more fully this demoralising and historically un-British situation, we must acknowledge the degree of fault on both sides.