Should we pity civil servants? Whitehall’s allure is fading

In the House of Commons on Monday, Keir Starmer accused Olly Robbins, the former — now sacked — top government official at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), for deliberately not telling him that Peter Mandelson failed his initial security vetting to become US ambassador. Starmer did what many, many panicked politicians have done before him: blame the civil service. Particularly in recent years, few political footballs have been punted around more. When he was a government advisor, Dominic Cummings promised a “hard rain” would come down on Whitehall, and he remains vituperative toward Britain’s bureaucracy. The civil service’s work-from-home habit has, since Covid, blessed us with an abundance of foam-flecked Daily Mail columns. Reform UK has promised all-out war if it enters government, cutting civil service HR and comms teams by at least 60%. 

And Starmer isn’t the only Labour figure to have a recent swing. In January, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, declared he would “rewire” the civil service — in front of a neon sign reading “move fast, fix things” — with no “sideways shimmy to another team or department if you fail to perform”.

The archetypal mandarin, then, is lazy, obsessed with process over outcome, and something of a stranger to their office desk. (Plus, the PM seems to be implying, secretive and conniving.) For a clever graduate, in this telling, the civil service offers an easy life: a well-pensioned, squishy middle ground between the corporate grind and the high-status penury of the arts. The last jobs-for-life left in 21st-century Britain. 

Is that account accurate? Pilfer an unattended lanyard and slip into SW1’s stately buildings. What you see will, in fact, have more in common with the artsy end of the employment spectrum than with the corporate world. Job cuts, low pay and scant promotion prospects have turned working for a nuclear-armed state, one that oversees the world’s sixth-largest economy, into something approaching a hobby career.

Behind the edifices of creamy Portland stone which run along the 640 meters of Whitehall are the offices from which much of the world was run for much of the past two centuries. Their present condition could be a metaphor for the nation. “You’ll have some nice parts where you can host dignitaries,” says James*, a youngish diplomat at the Foreign, Common and Development Office, of his department’s headquarters at King Charles Street. “But where you work, there’ll be damp; the toilets will be blocked; the wi-fi [will be] pretty crap.” It’s very Slow Horses, James says, in both office décor and the corresponding gallows humor.

These offices are staffed by much the same people as any halfway-prestigious private company: graduates, usually with humanities degrees from decent universities, in smart-casual dress, or a suit (but no tie) for big meetings. They write reports, send emails, and do generic admin. In this case, not in service of selling vacuum cleaners or bonds, but serving the political wishes of the government of the day by helping them formulate policy, then carrying it out. Everything from drawing up a new geopolitical strategy, to making sure a Commonwealth reception is stocked with enough sandwiches, can fall under a civil servant’s brief.

Rachel* joined the civil service — the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to be precise — from a different industry, and worked there for a couple of years in her mid-twenties before going back to the private sector. The money was one motivation for leaving: her salary when she quit was around £45,000, a lot less than what followed. Another was that familiar beast of Whitehall: bureaucracy, especially after Labour returned to power in 2024. “We would say all the time, ‘We never thought we’d miss the old Tory SpAds,’” she says. “[But] they were just so much easier to work with than the [Labour] ones.” Her team went from being able to liaise directly with government special advisers — political appointees working for Tory ministers — to being instructed to instead contact a minister’s private office of civil servants.

It was an “added layer of communication”, Rachel says, “which slowed everything down so much”, negated the actual hard work her team was doing, and contributed to a frustration which had her eyeing up the exit. The main reason she left, though, was the department’s promotional system, or lack thereof. “Essentially, someone has to leave the job for a promotion to become available.” 

Rachel’s is not the kind of story you want to hear if you care about Britain’s state capacity: someone talented and hard-working, who’s left money on the table to enter public service, being spat out. For what it’s worth, Max*, a twenty-something at the Treasury, thinks the idea that maddening layers of process drive civil servants out of the business — if you can call it that — is “slightly overdone”. James similarly believes that “the machine can move fast with the right incentives, or responding to the right demand signal”. True as this might be, a reputation for bureaucracy, even undeserved, will have its own damaging deterrent effect on those considering entering Whitehall.

What is agreed upon is the money problem. Max says that the lowest rungs of the Treasury are poorly paid even by general civil-service standards, with starting salaries well under £30,000. (Their US equivalents in Washington start on between the equivalent of £42,000 and £52,000, depending on their education level.) “I know of people who were actually cutting into the savings they had made from previous jobs in order to afford to be in London to work at the Treasury.” As much as people might want to work there, plain financial reality might quickly force them out. The result? “A big blob of the Treasury is actually south-west London private school types,” Max explains, “who can afford to grit their teeth and power through.” Pay-to-play is bad enough in arts and media. Do we really want it corroding the government’s economic engine?

James works abroad, in what’s called a “hardship area”: essentially, a poor, chaotic country which an urbane diplomat needs extra inducement to move to. It means a rather cushy setup: his accommodation is paid for, he gets around 40 days of annual leave, and he also receives a “flight package” to cover trips to the UK and elsewhere. And if you’re a diplomat with kids being educated where you’re stationed, the government has an obligation to maintain that same level of schooling. If they were at a fancy international school abroad, that often means the British taxpayer continuing to cover a private education when the family moves back home. But the Foreign Office has “taken a real hit” budget-wise, says James. “You are starting to hear stories of seniors being told the office won’t cover their kids that are upper-sixth at private school because it’s costing too much.”

With Foreign Office restructuring plans entailing a headcount reduction of up to 25% in the next few years, there’s a de facto “promotion freeze”, says James, with a lot of voluntary exit packages waved around threateningly. Similarly, says Max, the Treasury’s self-image as one of the “big-dog departments” means that people prefer not to move anywhere else in government. As a result, promotion within it is “very, very difficult” — creating additional pressure on those who can’t afford to wait things out. The City, with its big salaries, is ready to embrace those who bail.

The cost-cutting is affecting the quality of the civil service’s staff. Whitehall has traditionally leaned on high-caliber individuals who don’t have the stomach for 100-hour workweeks in the City, but the ever-increasing financial tradeoff is slimming down their number. Max says his senior bosses in their forties would generally affirm that “the top, top, top people from the various unis they went to would all try and get into the civil service”. He doesn’t see many quite as “high-grade” people closer to his own age. James makes a similar point: the FCDO has a class of “very competent” managers from their mid-forties to early sixties. “Would those people necessarily be doing the job now if they started with me? I think, increasingly, the civil service will become less attractive to that cohort.”

What does keep people involved? Something that money can’t buy, obviously. The same thing that makes people stomach shit pay and shit hours in capital-P Politics: proximity to power. Particularly if you’re at the FCDO, Treasury or Cabinet Office — the latter acts as a hub for much of the running of government — you can plausibly claim to have your ear next to the heartbeat of the state. You are the person, says Max, chatting to the person “who’s chatting to the Chancellor about [something] at 1pm”. It means that “at dinner parties, people will often want to hear about your job”, says James, in a way they don’t if you tell them you’re just another corporate lawyer. 

Of course, being close to power is not the same as having it, and confusing the two can be farcical. The department’s middle management, Max says, has plenty of “existential, balding, early-thirties men who aren’t quite clear where their life is headed. A lot of them do tend to enjoy having a Treasury email address. I think an exact thing a manager of mine said at one point was, ‘I have a Treasury email address, and they need to respect that.’” Above them, among the department’s senior staff, is a tinge of fatalism. “If you have chats,” says Max, “they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, things are shit.’ But even how they speak about it, you can kind of tell they enjoy knowing the ins and outs of why things are the way they are, and aren’t quite exactly like public discourse suggests.”

Alongside that is what Max calls a “weird scoffing” about the private sector; of seeing it populated by “bullshitters to the nth degree”. This antipathy, he suggests, “energizes a lot of people in different ways”. Are they so wrong to feel that way? The big-picture story of the past decade has been that states — their borders; their armies — actually matter again. Britain’s own state has again reached the size to which it swelled in the Seventies, with public spending around 45% of GDP, though much of that now goes on hospitals and care-home beds rather than typical appendages of Leviathan’s might.

What we are now learning is that size doesn’t always translate into efficacy. Advocates of a muscular, activist state must prevent that muscle from running to flab. The public sector’s inability to recruit the best people, largely because of the economic (some might call it parasitical) dominance of the City and adjacent industries, has a tangible impact on state capacity — on sovereignty, even. A weeks-long delay on sending a British warship to the drone-hit military base in Cyprus; the Office for National Statistics declining to the point where UK employment figures are almost guesswork — these and other examples of the Government’s eroding ability to exert control at home and abroad are partly a resource problem, but they are also crises in competence.

Maybe this only increases the importance of being closer to what’s left of our sovereignty. “There’s a widespread recognition,” says Max, “that this government, that government, all these governments are shite, and we break our backs trying to make them look decent. So do you want to be as close to the levers of power as possible? Or do you want to be in the backwaters feeling the frustration the country’s feeling?” The most basic, most essential kind of power there is — “the power of the government over the freedom of its subjects”, as Tom Wolfe put it in The Bonfire of the Vanities — will always retain some faint flash of glamour.

*Names have been changed

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