Peter Oborne in The Telegraph lifts the curtain on that ultra-secret world that exists in no-man's-land between ministers and their senior civil servants. Mr. Oborne sums up the dilemma, thus:
This letter [see original story] is neither more nor less than a statement of British constitutional practice. It sets out in clear terms how the constitutional role of the civil service has evolved in Britain over the last 200 years.
It is certainly true, as Mr Maude asserts, that the civil servant has a duty to carry out his or her minister’s instructions. But the letter does not challenge that. It merely adds that civil servants must also consider the interests of their own department.[My emphasis]
This is also true. Permanent secretaries are the accounting officers for the department that they head. Bear in mind that it is by no means unusual for ministers to issue instructions that, if carried out, would be deeply damaging to the national interest, or conflict with basic decency.
In such cases, it is emphatically not the task of civil servants to further their career by ingratiating themselves with ministers, but to warn and to advise, using the long constitutional memory that the civil service embodies.
Mr. Oborne is a wordsmith by trade and he knows how to use words to effect but I disagree with him. In my view, it is certainly right and proper that a senior civil servant should disagree, even disagree strongly, with a minister's policy but it must be done in private. The top departmental civil servants should have the freedom, in extremis, to approach the Cabinet Secretary and express their views to him and request that they be passed on to the prime minister of the day. But there the matter ends and - unless they resign on principle - there-after they should execute the minister's wishes to the full extent of their ability.
It is the job of politicians to make policy and, in the end, face us, the electorate and answer for it. Contrary advice having been given, it is the job of the civil service to implement that policy to the very best of their ability irrespective of private or departmental misgivings. I would be particularly interested in reading Mr. Gove's views on this given that he has had to fight, virtually single-handed, against not only teacher unions, local authorities and sundry quangos but also his own Ministry of Education which, according to several reports, is staffed almost entirely by Left-wing apparatchiks determined to foil his policies.
Sorry Mr. Oborne but I strongly urge you to redraft that article!
