Poppy Coburn is a journalist.
In the aftermath of Dominic Raab’s resignation, one Twitter user implored his followers to read Roger Knight’s Britain Against Napoleon. While it might at first glance seem irrelevant to a squabble over bias and accountability in the Civil Service, a quick read will quickly show obvious narrative parallels.
Knight’s primary thesis is that Britain’s primary weapon against the Napoleon’s armies was not, as one might expect, great men like Wellington, but rather the machinations of the men ‘behind the curtain’ who managed resources and organised logistics.
The new recruits – the heroes of Knight’s book were young – John Herries, the Commissary-In-Chief to the army, was just 24, while the Under-Secretrary of War, Henry Bunbury, was 25. It was young men, working themselves to sickness, who transformed the woefully decrepit administrative state of the 1790s into a genuine marvel of organisation capable of taking on Napoleon’s military might.
Of course, there was no official ‘Civil Service’ back in the early ninetheen century in the sense that we would recognise today – but there are clear administrative parallels nonetheless in the decedent, pre-reform period of the 1790s. At the turn of the century, many office staff started work at 11 o’clock and left for home at four. Administrative necessities – such as the settling of regimental accounts – were neglected. And, worst of all, the appointment of staff was based on patronage rather than quality. It was the fear of repeating the embarrassing military disasters of the previous decades, coupled with a broader anxiety about Britain’s place in the world, that acted as a catalyst for transformation.
As John Kingman said last year, Civil Service reform is a lot easier to advocate for than to achieve. Changes have been attempted for as long of the modern service has existed, starting with the nineteenth century Trevelyan-Northcote recommendations, borne from an intervention by William Gladstone against patronage frameworks.
These recommendations would further the post-Glorious Revolution progress from prerogative to patronage to privilege merit above all else, achieved through open competition. The service borrowed from Imperial Chinese examinations, the uptake of which was furthered by Robert Lowe’s 1870 Order of the Council, which tightened the grounds for official exemptions.
It would be reforms such as these that provoked Leo Tolstoy to write in 1867 that “an Englishman’s self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do”.
Just 1,800 colonial civil servants governed the Empire in 1874, and around 40,000 general staffers were employed at the turn of the nineteenth century. There are now 483,450 as of December 2022: a reaction to a more complex state, perhaps, but a gigantic figure nonetheless.
Despite this (or perhaps because of it), public sector productivity has plummeted. If the previous path of administrative reform was indeed from prerogative to patronage to merit, what are we to make of our current moment? Merit certainly no longer applies as an institutional value; rather, representation is now seen as the paramount goal for recruitment. The Situational Judgement test, the method of recruitment for Fast Stream applicants, better measures one’s politeness than ability to deliver results under pressure. It’s probably for the best: an applicant for the Rolls Royce is more likely to be called upon to mediate internecine office conflicts than to procure weapons for a prolonged ground war.
It seems that we have entered yet again into a period of decline and decadence. Stories of Civil Service incompetence are too numerous to name, so let’s just stick to headlines from the past week. In a seeming repeat of the Kabul airlift debacle, the Foreign Office has managed to bungle the removal of British citizens from Khartoum. Citizens were allegedly told not to join the UN convoy out of the region, even though the evacuation efforts were restricted only to diplomats. According to one account, diplomats allegedly said that they “couldn’t register citizens stranded in a civil war due to GDPR data concerns”.
It’s not just the Foreign Office who’ve had a rough week. A senior Home Officer employee working on asylum policy appears to have leaked to the Independent the claim that there will be an exodus of staff if the Illegal Migration Bill passes in its current state – because the Civil Service fears to act unlawfully. If anybody believes that said staffer – who by leaking to the press is breaching the Civil Service Code of Conduct – is acting on procedural principle rather than attempting to influence elected officials into dropping a policy that is politically distasteful to them, they’re due a visit from the wallet inspector.
Incompetence is one thing, but active hostility is quite another. Raab was merely the latest victim of what the political journalist Anthony Howard called “The Official View”: an arrogant disdain for Ministerial prerogative, manifesting in blockages and inefficiency. When this disdain is combined with a zealous conviction in the moral rightness of one’s own politics – also known as ‘wokeness’ – the wheels begin to fall off the Rolls Royce.
In such a light, Raab is correct to push for bold reforms. The era of impartiality passed as consensus politics dissolved in the later half of the twenteith century, with the modern incarnation providing little more than a smokescreen against scrutiny (observe the spectacle of senior civil servants gesturing to their strict adherence to impartiality rules right up to the moment they ‘defect’ to Labour). Even Stephen Pound, a former Shadow Minister for Northern Ireland under Labour, admits that civil servants are often biased and that the problem is getting noticeably worse.
It is no coincidence that Britain’s historic high points occurred when we were fiercely competitive and dynamic. Britain faces existential challenges, and will need bold leadership to overcome them. But as history shows, this also requires heroic acts of devotion on the part of our bureaucracy. A situation where those who are supposed to serve an elected government are not only bad at following orders but are actively frustrating said goals for ideological reasons is completely untenable.
Conservatives must not be afraid to be radical with their reforms, and would do well to prioritise above all else the promotion of young, intelligent and furiously ambitious staffers granted a level of autonomy not seen since the administration of Empire. If this means slashing staff numbers, tripling salaries, sacking the old guard and returning to meritocratic entry tests – so be it. They may well find the sorts of people who might wish to join up to such a service the sort would promote Britain, rather than denigrate it.