UNCIVIL SERVICE

Depending on your point of view, Britain's ambassador to the Sudan was lucky to be on holiday back in London when an enormous gun battle erupted in the capital Khartoum last week. In his absence, his staff would likely have been tidying up loose ends just as the first shots were fired. We can plausibly imagine their duties to have included final disbursements from the Overseas Aid Budget to a budding Sudanese women's band . Or facilitating some last minute governance box ticking for British business in one of the most unstable parts of Africa. Or taking part in that month's audit of micro-aggressions experienced by junior staff from their senior colleagues. Or wondering if the embassy supply of oat milk would hold out if things got out-of-hand. 

They then legged it, assisted by a bit of derring-do by the SAS. Naturally, as the latest FCO vogue is the projection of intangible "soft power", practical matters such as the care and protection of the 4,000 odd UK citizens in Sudan other than themselves might have been somewhat lower on the ambassadorial agenda. This is 2023 not 1885 and no official was going to hang around to see if some maddened Mahdi chucked a spear at them on the embassy steps. Dereliction of duty? Perhaps. But can you blame them? After all, their FCO colleagues had fled at the first whiff of cordite when the Taliban were in the process of recapturing Kabul in 2021. Except that the then Foreign Secretary (one D Raab) had ordered them back to their posts.

The week which saw the high-tailing to the Sudan exit signs also saw the defenestration of the Lord Chancellor, Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary-of-State for Justice. In consequence of a co-ordinated fit of pique by a small number of civil servants whose duty it was to support their minister in the delivery of government policy, one of the most senior members of the government felt honour bound to stand aside. The same Dominic Raab who had taken a robust approach throughout his ministerial career was found guilty of a few instances of "abrasive" behaviour rather than "abuse". But in the modern lexicon of the  "inappropriate", both words are conflated with that most heinous of new age crimes - bullying. Time past, the issues (such as they were) would have been resolved by a few firm but quiet words. Instead what we got was an absurdly lengthy, leaky and expensive KC enquiry running concurrently with an ill-informed trial by the media. It is quite a thing when the hurt feelings of a civil servant can be leveraged to sack a serving minister of a government with a majority as large as this one.

It's over 20 years since Peter Hennessy wrote his acclaimed account of the office of the the UK Prime Minister, its incumbents and the higher Civil Service since the Second World War. Were he to revise it today, there must be a good chance that he would identify April 2023 as that moment when the "Rolls Royce" ethos of the Civil Service finally died after a long and stuttering decline.  We are not talking here about those widespread strikes across the public sector and the demand for higher levels of protection from economic headwinds which are unavailable to the ordinary citizenry, notwithstanding the disruption is without precedent since the Miners Strike of 1984.  Rather it is those specific instances, such as the flight from Khartoum, which are more revealing of the culture at the heart of public service today and of the much diminished quality of governance in Great Britain which it signifies.

It would be fair to say that the government of the UK has been subjected to a sort of Fronde since the day of the Brexit Referendum result in 2016. The most obvious manifestation of this has been the continued and intense shrieking (despite a few local difficulties) of the SNP ministry in Scotland. The governing party at Westminster has also had to contend with different interpretations as to what leaving the EU actually meant within its own ranks. In 2018 and 2019 these differences brought Parliamentary processes to a virtual halt and encouraged many to suppose that the referendum result might be overturned through sheer inertia if not cumulative obstruction. The irresponsibility of the politicians at that time was without precedent since the Civil Wars of the 17th century. 

There have too been some high profile and tense stand-offs with the judiciary as the UK has sought to reclaim powers that had been lost to the "shared sovereignty" of the EU. Perhaps startled by the size of the Tory mandate in 2019, their Lord and Ladyships have begun to show a little more understanding of what needs to happen when citizens demand their laws derive from their own elected Parliament and these laws reflect the democratic choices made by UK citizens at the ballot box.

Egged by the mainstream media, large parts of which continue to carp about a decision made nearly eight years ago, these discontents have however had a powerful and lingering impact on the public sector in general and on the culture of the Civil Service in particular. There is no Fifth Column or "Deep State" at work here: public servants have a vote like everyone else. The problem is far more fundamentally rooted and is such that some parts of Whitehall and its ancillary establishment give every impression of supposing it is they rather than the elected government which calls the shots, a perspective which was reinforced by the egregious swelling of state power during the Covid pandemic. Indeed, Civil Service inertia and obstruction in the face of ministerial direction has become increasingly blatant. The instances of senior officials publicly criticising and undermining serving ministers are more frequent - who can forget Lord McDonald (erstwhile head of the FCO) calling the Prime Minister a liar in early 2022 and the sustained campaign to unseat Priti Patel at the Home Office. Dominic Raab is only the most recent target, almost all of whom are coincidentally linked by their support of Brexit. Whatever one thinks of the politicians themselves, this amounts to a complete inversion of the traditional relationship between the elected minister who bears ultimate responsibility and the unelected public servant who is seemingly accountable to no-one except their own caste.

Brexit has necessitated a profound re-fashioning of Britain's economy and geo-political position. Yet the traditional role of the Civil Service has been to manage the status quo, until directed otherwise by elected ministers. Naturally, many ministers lack the intellect or experience to force a change of direction, a dynamic which was hilariously lampooned in the series Yes Minister. Many are moved on before they have even mastered their brief, never mind their department. In such circumstances or in the absence of a Prime Ministerial direction, the default mode of the public official is continuity at best or obstruction at worst.

What has changed over the past two decades is the Civil Service has become even less accountable yet takes an increasingly discretionary view of the instructions issued by its democratically elected masters. The trend was set during the Blair ministry. "Call me Tony" dispensed with traditional cabinet government, preferring to run his administration via small cabals and by way of press releases. Setting the direction of the higher Civil Service (a long standing function of the office of the PM) seemed like far too much hard work and was delegated to the Cabinet Secretary. Blair was then surprised to be endlessly thwarted by the resultant vacuum, and not just by his increasingly bolshie neighbour in Number 11.

Yet the biggest spur to the change in official behaviours has been the deep and widespread implanting of the so-called "rights culture" throughout the public sector. The Civil Service tends to move at glacial speed, but once a trend has taken root, it remains deeply embedded. Government at both the national and local levels now has to be super-sensitive to diversity, "personal truth", "personal space" and inclusivity. Indeed an enormous official cadre has been brought into being to monitor and promote a set of human characteristics which are wholly irrelevant to the smooth running of governance. Yet elected ministers ignore this fatuous canon at their peril, as Dominic Raab has just found out. Indeed it is not too much to claim that the Equalities Act of 2010 (passed with minimal parliamentary oversight in the fag end of Gordon Brown's ministry) was the biggest land mine planted at the centre of government since the Second World War. The authority of the elected political class has been eroded to the advantage of the unelected official one.

The list of expensive official cock-ups for which there appears to be no accountability except via the indirect and blunt tool of the ballot box has never seemed so egregious. When the only things of which the establishment can boast in the past ten years are gay marriage and the timely procurement of an effective Covid vaccine by one bright, energetic woman and a team of 14 bods engaged from the private sector, you have to question the seriousness, never mind the abilities, of the higher Civil Service and public officialdom.

In 1644 Parliament, exasperated by the inability of the establishment to secure the fruits for which the civil wars were being fought, brought into being the New Model Army. With its professionalism and high ethos, this outfit was to help transform the working and effectiveness of the early modern British state. Then, things actually got done by an early version of the meritocracy. But now? 

Is it not time for a New Model Civil Service?