But perhaps they are not the only ones to blame when things go wrong. I’ve often been intrigued how it is that a government member who has perhaps on one day been in charge of railways or maybe the environment and then overnight after a cabinet re-shuffle find themselves able to talk with absolute authority about childcare or justice. Well of course this could always be the result of a waving of the Prime Ministerial magic wand that PM imagine they've got, but more likely it is because the apparent polymath is just another ‘rentamouth’ who has been briefed moments before stepping in front of the camera.
So who is it then who does the briefing you might ask? Well as most of you probably know that this
task falls to the highly paid civil servants that populate the corridors of
Whitehall, the ‘Sir Humphrey Applebys’ of this world. Progressing this thought begged the question, what is it that happens when the day after the election, the whole ideology
of the government has changed and the entire direction of the department in
which these mandarins might have been ensconced for years starts plodding in a
completely new direction? I somehow
could not convince myself that these individuals and their immediate
subordinates suddenly about face and begin to think about things completely
differently. If they did that it would often
mean abandoning policies and work that they had spent years maybe even a career
developing. My own experience of public
service support staff didn’t extend to national level but my time with a county
council and London Fire Authority gives me strong grounds for inference. I have observed close-hand exercises in sycophancy
and duplicity that would put Basil Fawlty to shame, and seen policies unashamedly
manipulated by backroom staff. Policies
that I had worked on from an operational standpoint found themselves being ‘steered’. Little changes in sentences and paragraphs,
small nudges by a department head following a ‘meeting’ with a senior non-operational
manager etc. All these things managing to
take the teeth out if not derail the thing altogether (there’s a lovely
metaphoric mixture for you).
So what does happen?
Well anybody who watched ‘Yes Minister’ will have seen Sir Humphrey manoeuvre
things so that he almost always got his own way and somehow the minister was
left believing that he had won the day. ‘But
that’s just fiction’ I hear you say; and of course you would be right. However, maybe there might be an ounce or two
of fact in there somewhere. As children
we all laughed at and enjoyed the tales of Hans Christian Anderson and most of
them were allegorical in one way or another.
It seems to me that an apt one to consider in this context would be the tale
of The Emperor’s New Clothes where two weavers manage to convince an emperor that their
non-existent cloth is invisible to stupid people or those unfit to hold their
position. Given that MPs don’t always
demonstrate the highest level of intellect…..?
I think it’s an issue worth consideration, not to take the
heat off the ministers, after all they accepted the job so if they don’t like it
they know what they can do. But perhaps
we should be trying to find out who else is to blame for the succession of
inept administrations that appear to destroying this country. But for the immediate future the pressing
issue is, ‘Is the Lord Chancellor wearing any clothes?’ What do you think?
