Civil Service: Politicisation

Lord Young of Old Windsor Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Old Windsor (CB)]

My Lords, I too salute my noble friend Lord Butler on securing this debate. My contention is that a neutral Civil Service is vital in supporting the constitutional channels of communication between state and government, especially in a crisis, and especially in the context of our unwritten constitution, which is 99% reliant on precedent, and 1% “seat of the pants” when things go wrong.

Before I came to your Lordships’ House, I was, for many years, Private Secretary to the late Queen. I offer an illustration of what happens when that 1% occurs in a crisis. It relates to the events of the first week of April 2020—the second week of lockdown, as your Lordships will recall. In so doing, I am conscious of the omertà principles I signed up to. As your Lordships would expect, I have sought permission from those whom I will name.

It was the early evening of Monday 6 April. I was walking home from Buckingham Palace in the pouring rain; the Queen had just moved to Windsor Castle. I stopped at a bus shelter to take a call from the excellent Martin Reynolds, the principal private secretary to Boris Johnson. We knew that the Prime Minister had gone into hospital the night before. His protection officers had overheard some consultants discussing how they were going to tell Carrie that he might have to go into ICU and on to a ventilator. Clearly, I had to update the Queen on this.

We had our suspicions, because, just the previous Wednesday, the final face-to-face audience at Buckingham Palace had been scheduled. The Prime Minister considered it his duty to be there to do it face to face and the late Queen considered it her duty too—in a sort of Blitz spirit, “Well, I’ve got to die sometime” attitude—but it really was not the moment for taking unnecessary risks. In the end, both participants were so keen to go ahead with it that Martin and I arranged for him to tell the Prime Minister that the Palace wanted to cancel and for me to tell the Queen that No. 10 had got cold feet, which was very lucky, because, by the end of the telephone call—obviously, I would not reveal what was discussed—the Prime Minister had started coughing. It was just the next day that I had a call from my noble friend Lord Sedwill, who I know would wish to be in his usual place today, to say that the Prime Minister had tested positive for Covid, so there was a scenario that we had avoided, luckily, of an unknowingly positive Head of Government being in proximity to a strong but vulnerable Head of State, and history might have taken another constitutionally taxing path.

But back to that rainy bus shelter near Battersea: more and more people were joining the call as I was sitting there on my mobile phone. There was no Deputy Prime Minister. There was no precedent to draw from. Yes, Spencer Perceval had been shot and died—there was some precedent there—but there was no precedent for a Prime Minister who was alive but unable to communicate for an unforeseen period.

It was the impartial nature of the discussion of what was described as scenario C—the euphemistic, anodyne-sounding scenario which was really about what would happen if the Prime Minister died—that was so important. The impartial nature of the advice that I was receiving from the Cabinet Secretary and the principal private secretary, enabling me to report to Her Majesty in supporting her as Head of State, was crucial. It put state before government and certainly before patron. It is crucial when the rulebook runs out to be able to rely on people who have clear judgment to be able to navigate the space between the lines.