Sir Olly Robbins, the official who allegedly ignored the independent vetting of Mandelson, has said that it was a done deal — already announced to the public and the wider world. Crucially, he claims No. 10 was dismissive towards any vetting in the first place, and that his job, as a civil servant, was simply to accede to the wishes of the Prime Minister. Downing Street, for its part, is claiming that it did not lie; it was just unaware of the vetting outcome. It didn’t ask, didn’t inquire, and therefore didn’t know.

The truth is that the Prime Minister’s excuse for this Mandelson scandal is neither an aberration, nor evidence that the machinery of government requires a small tweak. It is the entirely predictable product of a broken political class, which has spent decades diffusing accountability, and blaming anyone but themselves.

The Conservatives, for they were no different, won four consecutive general elections, held office for 14 years, and cycled through five different prime ministers, yet spent far too much of that time explaining to the British public why they were unable to deliver the commitments on which they were elected. “The system” was blocking them, they said; it was the fault of “the Blob”. They were right, in part, but the blame is misplaced. And if this lesson is not learned, we will continue to spiral into decline.

“The Blob” is a metaphor for the inner workings of the British state. It is deployed by ministers to describe the feeling when they repeatedly pull a lever in government — only to find that nothing happens. This sometimes manifests itself as simple inaction on ministerial priorities by unelected officials; at other times as direct, insidious opposition from within the ranks of officialdom.

“The Blob” was once considered something of a conspiracy theory — the failing Tory government was blaming the Rolls-Royce civil service for its own failings. This view was so strongly held in some quarters that when it came into power, the Labour government of 2024 essentially prostrated itself before Whitehall. There would be no more “gaslighting” of the civil service. Now, finally, “the adults were back in the room”, and officials would be free to work their magic.

Starmer appointed Sue Gray as Chief of Staff to reset relationships between ministers and officials, and create a “positive” culture of “collaboration”. Indeed, her initial words in No. 10 to the elite ranks of the Civil Service were: “Thank you so much for welcoming us into your house… [w]e are really mindful that we are guests here, and this is where you work.” Elected officials and their government, according to Gray, were guests in the house of the Civil Service.

Within months, it fell apart. Gray was forced out in October 2024 by which time it had become clear that Labour had no plan for government beyond letting the civil service choose what it should do. By early December the same year, Labour had begun briefing that Dominic Cummings’ criticisms of the system were correct. A timeline many wouldn’t have expected.

Later, as relations between the Blob and No. 10 hit new lows, Starmer claimed too many in Whitehall were comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. The response from the civil service was extraordinary. The following day, Robert Peston reported that one official had told him there was “a mood that we [the civil service] should pull the plug on him” — a remarkable threat to make to the Prime Minister, and leader of the party with the largest electoral majority this century.

But rather than pointing out the extraordinary nature of such a claim, with unelected bureaucrats openly threatening an elected government, Peston summarized the news as “another unforced error” by Downing Street. This same pattern holds today. We now read that the civil service has “turned against” Starmer, and that there is a serious crisis in “ministerial-civil service relations”. The Government’s route out, it is argued, should be to work “to rebuild some of the trust lost by the events of the past week”, by treating officials more positively, and leaving the foundations well alone.

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Should we pity civil servants?

By Josiah Gogarty

Given all this, it should be obvious that the Blob exists. We hear the same stories over and over again from ex-ministers. The Blob can delay ministerial priorities until the point they’re shuffled out; it can direct policy by briefing in particular directions; and it can slow or kill off priorities it wants to. What’s worse is that some senior officials are extremely happy for this to happen (such as those who leak to journalists their praise or condemnation of a particular government).

In the end, though, blame for its existence lies firmly with our politicians. They choose the re-shuffles, they choose to shy away from fundamental changes to the system, they form governments without any plan or direction, they build quango after quango, and appoint unelected officials to positions of power.

But the Blob allows ministers to deny accountability for outcomes, prevent parliamentary debates about trade-offs, and claim that their hands are tied should a decision prove unpopular. The Blob has stepped into the vacuum — making choices, or simply avoiding actions, delaying what they dislike or taking decisions that should have been reserved for our elected representatives. In short, it has provided politicians with the ability to shirk responsibility, to come in without plans, to re-shuffle ministers regularly, and to avoid the hard work of deep state reform.

The Mandelson scandal is a clear example of this: the Prime Minister is able to play on the murky role of the civil service to avoid the fact that he was ultimately responsible for appointing Mandelson. No one denies that No. 10 wanted him as Ambassador. No one denies that they had announced it publicly. The problem isn’t in process, and it isn’t in Downing Street having a preference for a candidate. The problem, in the end, is that the Prime Minister appointed a terrible candidate, and is now reaping the whirlwind of that bad decision.

Today’s system — a labyrinth of bodies, independent panels and commissions, officials, and politicians — ensures that no single individual is ever clearly responsible for a decision, let alone an outcome. In many cases, nobody truly knows who is responsible, if anyone actually is. Every hard choice is outsourced to a wider web; every politically controversial decision is delayed and shifted away from ministers; and every major failure is subject to an inquiry that takes years, whose recommendations are accepted in full, and then forgotten entirely.

Westminster is now moving to insulate itself from any real change. There will be reviews, new safeguards, and rehashed protocols for appointments. Each will be presented as a necessary correction, yet each will fail to solve the fundamental problem. It is no exaggeration to say that finally ending this system is one of the most important pieces of work to be done right now. The future of our nation hangs upon it.

We know, after all, that this system does not work. Low wages, a broken healthcare system, broken borders, a dwindling number of taxpayers, a continuous cost of living crisis, economic stagnation, and declining living standards. The system has lurched us from crisis to crisis and never presented a vision to build a positive outcome for our nation. The best it has achieved is managed decline.

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Keir Starmer: last of the technocrats

By Aris Roussinos

But contrary to popular Westminster opinion, the web can be disentangled. Institutions can be reformed, replaced, or entirely abolished; responsibility for decisions can be given back to our elected representatives. Politicians can take charge by leading and making decisions, rather than accepting the current system.

We must not forget — as our political class has done for decades — that our Parliament is awe-inspiringly powerful. There is no court that presides over it, there is no law that limits it; Parliament is sovereign and supreme. All Acts can be re-written, all laws remade. There is nothing, but the incapacity of our politicians, to prevent dramatic and wholesale change. Leadership, in the end, is simple. You make choices, you take decisions, and you carry the consequences.

Politicians can choose to lead once more. They can reassert where power lies, and to accept the risks that come with it. They can ensure single-person owners of projects. If a minister takes a decision, they must own it in full. If it succeeds, the credit is theirs; if it fails, the blame is theirs. This is the way of the world outside Westminster. Only useless kings get to blame their endless advisers; elected leaders have no one but themselves to blame. No new process can substitute for this principle.

This is not radical, nor is it novel. Ministers should be responsible for their departments. The system should do what a democracy is supposed to — connect decisions to consequences. Only a political system grounded in this principle can reverse our decline and invent a new future. But such an aspiration would require our politicians to take accountability and to act boldly.

I fear, though, that Starmer and Westminster will draw the wrong lessons from this crisis. I fear Starmer will think “if only procedures had been properly followed, or if only we had better procedures, this never would have happened”. He should instead ask himself: “Why did I appoint this man? Why didn’t I just apologise for a bad decision? Why is leadership so difficult?”

I suspect that line of questioning, because it puts responsibility where it should actually lie, is not one he would like to take — nor would other politicians. For ultimately it leads to the most fundamental question of all: “Am I good enough to do this job?” And many, I suspect, will not much like the answer.

The disruptive ambitions of “aggressive, hostile powers” were a clear concern of Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office, in his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee yesterday. But he is now dismissed from his post, along with the weight of institutional expertise he carried. Sir Keir Starmer explicitly blamed Robbins for the fact that he was not until recently told of the damning UKSV assessment which deemed Mandelson high risk before his departure for Washington. A career civil servant, long steeped in the nuances of internal process, Robbins offered explanations with the eloquent but slightly stunned air of a man roughly pushed out of a space capsule, suddenly breathing different air. Yet as his quizzing by MPs shed light on the battle between the Government and civil service, it was the civil service that came out bruised but on top.

At the heart of this row are two different understandings on process, both flawed in different ways. The Government is simply careless of process, unless its pious invocation serves to advance a policy goal — which is why, for instance, a particular interpretation of “international law” was so loudly and persistently invoked over the doomed Chagos deal. With the Mandelson fiasco, though, Starmer’s inner circle has been exposed as unusually contemptuous of the civil service, along with its operations and safeguards. It is a dispiriting development from a Prime Minister elected in large part because of his professed adherence to ethics.

In response to pressure from No. 10, the civil service didn’t jettison process. But it did burrow deeper into it, finding procedural levers which technically permitted it to give the government what it so badly wanted. By Sir Olly’s account, an uneasy Foreign Office tried at times to stand its ground, and at others worked diligently at the flexible outer limits of permitted procedure to fulfill the Government’s requests. Ironically, it was for pursuing the latter path that Robbins has now found himself shoved into a pothole. Yet neither strategy exactly inspires full confidence in how the British state works.

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The dark shadow of the Blairites

By Aaron Bastani

Before the question of the Peter Mandelson appointment ever reached Sir Olly’s desk, barely a week into his new job in January 2025, it had flouted normal process in almost every way possible. As a candidate for ambassador to the US, the UK’s most sensitive diplomatic posting, Mandelson was already a dubious choice. From his earlier resignations to his infamous “Prince of Darkness” nickname, it didn’t take tremendous insight to guess that Mandelson might run into some difficulty with higher-level vetting.

Aside from his now notorious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson had business links to China and Russia through his Global Counsel consulting firm. This was flagged early during due diligence, of which Starmer was made aware. Even the most naïve inhabitant of 10 Downing Street would surely have taken a cursory look at the Mandelson CV and thought “one to watch” — and Starmer was no greenhorn but a former director of public prosecutions. Quite apart from this, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary in November 2024, had openly warned the Prime Minister that if he intended to make a political appointment to the post of Washington ambassador, then the Foreign Office would develop a vetting plan to reveal any issues “of which you should be aware before confirming your choice.”

Case’s advice was ignored, for reasons which Starmer still hasn’t explained. The fact is, No 10 wanted their man in post quickly. Mandelson, a long-standing mentor to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was seen as a potentially invaluable, politically sinuous Trump-whisperer: the whiff of sulfur was a key element in his appeal. Downing Street publicly trumpeted the appointment in December, long before Mandelson’s full vetting was completed. Robbins said that some in the Cabinet Office queried whether Mandelson needed vetting at all, something Number 10 denies. Either way, Mandelson’s transition to Washington was clearly treated as a done deal, including giving him advanced access to high-level briefings. By late January, when responsibility for high-level vetting arrived in Robbins’s in-tray, the political stakes were very high indeed. There were frequent phone calls and “constant pressure” from the Prime Minister’s office, Robbins said, asking when the vetting was going through.

Even as No. 10 apparently sought first to ignore, then rush, then pressure the process around the appointment, it completely lost sight of the essential principle such a procedure is meant to uphold: that individuals deemed dangerous to national security must not be placed in positions of high trust and influence.

Robbins, in contrast, was clearly concerned with national security. Even during his grilling from MPs, he expressed anxiety that the spotlight on the details of developed vetting might be of undue interest to malevolent foreign states. When the negative UKSV evaluation trickled in, it must have proved an awkward moment. But the Foreign Office had the final say, and Robbins said that its own security team had expressed full confidence that they could “manage the risks” from Mandelson, which is why he signed the appointment off.

The most obvious flaw in the process arises from how the UKSV assessment was passed on to Robbins. He learned of it, he said, in terms of an oral briefing from a Foreign Office security official who described the UKSV judgment on Mandelson’s status as “a borderline case” but “leaning toward” recommending clearance be denied. By this reading, the final call might still be up for grabs, with mitigations. But that is far more tentative than the actual UKSV document now being circulated, in which the “overall concern” about the candidate was marked “high” and the outcome was “clearance denied or withdrawn”. It appeared Robbins was discouraged from seeing the physical UKSV document, according to department protocol. Yet while he rightly defends the high confidentiality of developed vetting, there seems no reason why a hard copy of the outcome alone should not have been made visible to him.

Was the secrecy of the process such that Robbins himself was misled? Either way, the debacle suggests that for all the British state’s theoretical commitment to correct procedure, its fulfillment is highly dependent on the government’s respect for it. And the more that is known about the Mandelson affair, and No. 10’s behavior around it, the more apparent it becomes that the impatient or deliberate casting aside of proper protocol and safeguards is not a bug of Starmer’s government — but a feature.

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Labour’s humiliating MAGA-whispering

By Jenny McCartney

In his testimony, Robbins said that Downing Street made inquiries as to whether a “head of mission” diplomatic role might be found for Matthew Doyle, then serving as the PM’s head of communications. Robbins had explained that this would be hard to defend at a time when he was in danger of making very senior and experienced diplomats redundant. There was also a suggestion from No. 10, Robbins said, that Mandelson might make Doyle part of the US embassy team. In the end, Doyle was elevated to the House of Lords, where he was subsequently denied the Labour whip after campaigning for a candidate accused of paedophilia. But Robbins saw the Doyle discussion as part of a wider push to put political appointments in roles previously occupied by civil servants, which had generated discomfort in the Foreign Office.

Beyond Starmer and McSweeney, meanwhile, there are other signs that members of the Prime Minister’s inner circle are resistant to external examination. Consider Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser (NSA). He has often been quoted as observing that Mandelson’s appointment process was “weirdly rushed”. But his own has not been without controversy. His appointment as NSA is the first time that the role, created in 2010, has been given to a special adviser and political appointee; normally it’s occupied by a career civil servant.

Unlike his predecessors, and despite repeated requests, Powell as NSA hasn’t once publicly appeared before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) — though he has agreed to attend in private. Having appointed a special adviser to the job, the Government has since argued that it is not “appropriate” for serving special advisers such as Powell to give evidence before select committees. It seems comfortable with an unusual degree of opacity surrounding his international operations.

In late March, a JCNSS report expressed concern over the national security threat from China, and the balance which the Government is striking between security and trade in its dealings with Beijing. It was published days after Powell met the Chinese foreign minister in Beijing, a trip not publicly disclosed in advance. The “lack of clarity” over who was responsible for national security, the report said, “hampers the possibility for external scrutiny and challenge.”

In opposition, trust and transparency were Labour watchwords. Yet the disabling of Starmer’s ethical antennae will surely go down as one of the tragedies and mysteries of modern British history. A lawyer by profession – and by all accounts a conscientious one – did he allow himself somehow to be persuaded that this is how clever people do politics? If so, his team of young bucks and old Blairites has not served him or the country well. During the Prime Minister’s painful, tight-lipped performance in the House of Commons on Monday, he was asked if there could be other instances in which people had failed UKSV vetting with national security implications. He flatly indicated that this, and more, would form part of the coming review. The questions summoned by the erstwhile Prince of Darkness still have a very long way to run.

Downing Street this week has essentially confirmed this assessment. The recurring nightmare of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal cannot be banished with a backroom reshuffle alone. In an effort to rescue Starmer’s zombie premiership, the current line is, in essence: the Prime Minister did nothing. He knew nothing. He was not told, he did not ask, and he could not have reasonably been expected to do so. Nobody told him and so the man deemed responsible, Sir Olly Robbins, has been fired.

So we’re back to an unedifying ministerial dance of defending the least bad of two options. The first is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed “our man in Washington”, despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, and with the Prime Minister ignoring his inability to pass the vetting process. The second option — and this is the official position of the Government — is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed US ambassador despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, but with the Prime Minister unaware that he had failed his deep security vetting. While the first implies that Starmer has misled Parliament and the public repeatedly, the second merely signals utter incompetence.

For a Prime Minister who lacks the ability to define his own politics and communicate a moral purpose for his government, either account is terminal. In contrast with the ideological crusading of Brexit, Corbynism, and Liz Truss’s doomed Reaganite experiment, the Prime Minister promised to tone down the big ideas, dial down the politics and lock in. He based his appeal on personal probity and his supposed abilities as an administrator. To that end, he said, “there’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.

But this “post-ideological” offer is ironically rooted in a premise that is, in fact, deeply ideological: if we strip back the partisanship, steering the ship of state is a technical problem to be solved by getting to grips with the details. Certainly, it explains Starmer’s embrace of our system of rule-by-committee. The relevant stakeholders shall be consulted.

But politics is not the equivalent of watchmaking, tinkering with the nuts and bolts of a complex machine until it ticks soundly. Rather, it is a never-ending process of managing and choosing between conflicting interests. There are (or were) people around Starmer who clearly understand this. Morgan McSweeney, for one, was fully plugged into the weird Matrix of Labour factionalism, with all its competing visions of Britain and the world. Here’s another irony, as Starmer’s aides pushed hard for Mandelson as an appointee. Whatever the Prime Minister’s own commitments to post-ideological technocracy, the people around him knew Mandelson represented a kind of politics that they themselves were invested in — the world of Cool Britannia, liberal globalization, and the transatlantic alliance.

Those two currents — the stakeholder state and the hard-nosed politicking — have long been in tension. On the one hand, after all, New Labour created for itself a kind of diffuse parallel state of arms-length bodies, expert appointees and independent regulators, neutral in theory but which nonetheless reshaped the constitution. The “old Labour” view of meddling, top-down governance would give way to a new understanding of power. “New public management theory” introduced marketization and competition into the public sector. New committees and modern bureaucracies proliferated to oversee the shift. But while ministerial authority was dispersed across this new quangocracy, Blair himself attempted to circumvent the unwieldy machine with his adoption of “sofa government”. He ceded power with one hand, and tried to grab it back with the other.

Starmer has fallen into the same trap. His instinctive legalism holds international law and an activist judiciary as superior to every state on Earth; the law must protect the individual from the unseemly power of the demos. It’s notable, here, that the Prime Minister’s whole professional life — he entered No. 10 at 61 — was spent defending the victims of government overreach. The professional-managerial classes that he represents so vividly are the very administrators of the contemporary, post-Blairite public sector, the very civil servants that may have waved Mandelson through and ruined Starmer for good.

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What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong

By Jonny Ball

One of Starmer’s supposed selling points was his experience running public prosecutions at the head of a major public body. This was the serious Roundhead to Boris Johnson’s clownish Cavalier. And yet his grip on power is as elusive as everyone since Blair. The Prime Minister is unable to live up to his promise of delivering easy efficiency through the Whitehall networks. “Mission Units” have been set up, then scrapped. Every new season seems to come with a relaunch focused on a “delivery phase” that never quite arrives.

Here, again, is another irony. For it was the PM himself who last year told the Liaison Committee of his frustration that “every time I go to pull a lever”, the machinery of government is so clogged and sclerotic that “the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”. This is an interpretation of the British state’s cumbersome, bloated nature that’s equivalent to the common spectacle of Conservatives bemoaning the dire state of public services — as if they themselves weren’t responsible.

Even so, even after almost three decades of the quangocracy, these latest revelations have the power to amaze. Defenders of Robbins have emerged to say that it is routine for ministers not to be told of the outcome of deep vetting. Permanent secretaries — the most senior civil servants — can, apparently, overrule vetting advice without the knowledge of secretaries of state or MPs. This suggests a level of dysfunction in the relationship between elected politicians and the deep state that’ll shock most Britons, giving life to Dominic Cummings’s oft-repeated claim: the Government does not run the country.

Next week, meanwhile, Robbins may address the Foreign Affairs Committee investigating the scandal. In other words, this chapter is by no means closed. Bad news, of course, for Starmer — but also his successor. For prime ministers will continue to be hoisted by their own administrative petards until they tackle a central issue of our time: the diffusion of state capacity across the bureaucracy. The spectacle of political leaders claiming impotence in the face of the state apparatus is deadly to democracy, and reversing the trend requires a reassertion of real executive and ministerial authority, to say nothing of a fundamental change in the mindset of a political class that would likely interpret such a development as an authoritarian power grab. On the contrary, it would constitute a return of the political to domains that have for too long remained in a technocratic abyss.

That’s for the future. For now, Labour MPs watch on in grim resignation. Yet there is no alternative: a Blairite health secretary with an ultra-thin majority representing clean-shaven Davos Labour, tainted both by Mandelson and by the fact that he’s disliked by the membership; a more plausible King of the North, but stuck sulking outside of Parliament; a less plausible Angela Rayner, who struggles to convince colleagues that she wouldn’t represent a serious liability in the highest of offices.

And so the Starmer era totters on. Perhaps until May, when a local election disaster awaits his hollowed-out party, or until the clamor from senior ministers reaches a crescendo, as MPs recall their fragile majorities. Until then, Starmer lurches from scandal to scandal, less the hapless child at the front of the DLR and more the passenger on a ghost train, careering wildly across the broken railroads of the British state.

Half a millennium on from Gutenberg, it is taken for granted that if something is written down, it’s remembered — which means (paradoxically) we can forget about it. So what happens when written records are lost? If no one else can quite remember, does that mean the event didn’t happen? This question has loomed large with recent revelations that the Cabinet Office’s “propriety and ethics” team broke into a safe in 2022, to retrieve a report detailing a historic investigation of allegations made against Dame Antonia Romeo, and then destroyed the dossier.

Romeo had been accused of bullying by Foreign Office staff while working as consul-general in New York in 2017. The investigation was later dropped, prompting some to claim a cover-up. The report was stored in said safe until 2022 when Darren Tierney, then head of the government standards watchdog, retrieved and destroyed the documents.

Was this a career-saving act of deliberate forgetting? If so, it worked: Romeo was appointed Cabinet Secretary last week by Keir Starmer. Tierney, for his part, insists he only obtained the report to help in redacting a memoir by the former diplomat Lord McDonald of Salford. The same Lord McDonald, in fact, who briefed last week against Romeo’s appointment; perhaps it’s a coincidence that a fishy incident of record-deletion should also bubble to the media surface at the same moment. Or perhaps not.

In any case, the impression is of all-out Whitehall war, as competing civil service factions vie for the chance to Yes, Minister Starmer’s ailing government. But beyond the byzantine intrigues of career bureaucrats, the casual destruction of an important report speaks to a deeper sense that Britain is now governed by a universal policy of strategic forgetfulness: an amnesiocracy.

There is surely a strategic amnesia in the ongoing, obdurate official inability to remember or grapple with the cumulative enormity of the rape gang scandals. Despite the horror this ongoing national catastrophe engenders, successive reports seem to generate outrage at intervals, only to be officially forgotten again, every time, without anything significant ever changing. Most recently, having reluctantly promised an inquiry, Labour seems to be trying to kick it into the long grass. Perhaps Starmer hopes the public will forget about all the child rape and torture, and stop asking.

A similar instinct seemed to guide the recent Ministry of Justice order for Courtsdesk, a digital court reporting resource, to delete its archives. After alleging that Courtsdesk had breached its agreement by sharing sensitive data with a third-party AI company, courts minister Sarah Sackman ordered the platform to delete its archive.

This prompted widespread outcry, with journalists warning that losing the archive would amount to covering up further grooming gang trials and drastically reducing the transparency of Britain’s criminal justice system. Then, hours before it was due to shut down, Justice Secretary David Lammy U-turned on the decision.

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The tragedy of Keir Starmer’s Substack

By Mary Harrington

Was Labour trying to make criminal justice records less accessible? It’s certainly the case that court reporting supplies a stream of judgments radically out of kilter with the moral instincts of the general public, especially where “human rights” are concerned. Were I an official in the Ministry of Justice, I dare say I’d be delighted to see a large, searchable, years-long open-access database of such criminal cases wiped, in favor of a system that required reporters to make individual (and no doubt usefully onerous) applications to individual courts for specific cases.

How deliberate you assume this habitual drift toward amnesia to be probably depends on how much trust you still have that the British government has your particular interests at heart. But even if we refuse to attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, this still invites the question: why is our ruling caste getting stupider? Or, at least, more forgetful?

For amnesiocracy is hardly unique to Labour. In their noble recent pledge to cut student loan interest rates, for example, the Conservative Party seems unable to recall having designed the system in the first place. The same goldfish-like mentality appears to afflict the Tories elsewhere, while fulminating in Parliament about immigration, even as they appear to have forgotten just how much of this dyspeptic debate is a direct consequence of (really very recent) Tory policy decisions. Yes, they have to put on a show at PMQs; but the performance of not remembering previous policy decisions is so convincing it does look like they simply don’t remember.

When it comes to the habitual weaponized forgetfulness of our permanent bureaucracy, Cameron probably bears at least a share of the blame. For he presided over a primordial act of amnesiocracy: closing Britain’s civil service college, in 2012, to save money. This school served, from 1970 to 2012, as the repository and transmission mechanism for institutional memory within Britain’s permanent bureaucracy. When it was closed, few of its teaching functions were replaced. We can reasonably assume that, 14 years on, many of the older civil servants who trained prior to its closure have retired or left. Counting just the Fast Stream, we can estimate around 12,000-15,000 more have joined the service since Sunningdale closed; many of these have surely been promoted to positions of authority by now, all without any longer-term institutional memory.

Might this have anything to do with the complaint, now audible across both Labour and Tory figures, that ministers routinely pull levers and find that nothing happens? Was it Cameron’s decision to delete Britain’s institutional governance memory — one held in the aggregate memory of training personnel and veterans rather than written down — that began our long national slide toward the current sense of no one knowing how anything works? This isn’t quite the same kind of forgetfulness as the kind that elides “due diligence”, destroys files, or forgets to cut contact with convicted sex traffickers, but on a practical level it probably affects the public’s lives more from day to day.

Nothing is ever monocausal. Is it the phones? Hugh of St Victor would have been unimpressed with MPs who need the prompt of their iPhones to speak in Parliament, or who (allegedly) even use AI to compose their speeches. There’s also evidence that internet overuse affects memory, perhaps making all our governing class dimmer and more hyperfocused on the moment. Some even suggest this is a positive benefit: Big Thinkers have been asserting that “the Google Generation has no need for rote learning” since before David Cameron was elected.

Hugh of St Victor, meanwhile, would have insisted that without a store of memorized material to think with, everyone is more stupid. And regardless of whether you set much store by medieval monks, no one can deny that smartphones’ ubiquity has accelerated the news cycle to such a pace that a bureaucrat eager to bury inconvenient facts often only needs to wait for the next online panic. It takes a curveball event, such as the Epstein file release — by a foreign government with no particular incentive to make Labour’s life any easier — to cut through this strategy of weaponizing the public’s own forgetfulness.

Along with phones, could the comparative paucity of science and technology graduates in the Civil Service also be having an effect? The Telegraph reports that only 23% of top civil service officials have STEM degrees; once you exclude scientific advisers, this drops to a handful. And perhaps this paucity is also itself an effect. Reports point the finger at Civil Service recruiting practices that favor socially adept groupthinkers, and filter out anyone more interested in being right than being liked — a personality type that describes many STEM graduates.

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Jeffrey Epstein's corrupt overclass

By Mary Harrington

Intermittent efforts do seem to be made to inject a little more reality-orientation into the civil service. Dominic Cummings’ famous call for “super-talented weirdos and misfits” to refresh civil service thinking was, just as famously, defeated by the woman he called “Princess Nut Nut” – a woman who, despite obviously her ninja office politics chops, could not really be described as a STEM whiz. And though Cummings didn’t get his weirdos, after Covid, targets were put in place to increase STEM graduate recruitment in the Fast Stream. Recently, too, Labour have announced plans to establish a replacement civil service college, to replace the lost Sunningdale.

But what if this simply ends up transmitting the existing government culture to a new generation, amnesias and taboos and all? What if they’re still filtering out anyone detail-oriented but disagreeable? If so, nothing will change. For the amnesiocratic tic ultimately points toward something far more fundamental than training schemes or recruitment quizzes: a basic metaphysical outlook that treats reality as something conjured into being by fiat, through the written word.

Depressingly familiar among progressive arts graduates, and woefully incompatible with planning and executing anything substantial in the world of atoms, this is the mindset that asserts humans are whatever sex they say they are. It’s perhaps also the mindset that treats destroying a report as equivalent to un-happening the events in the report. The same one that writes lengthy programs for change no one has the slightest idea how to implement, and will have forgotten about next week, while private equity buys up GP surgeries and family homes, sinkhole repair lorries fall into sinkholes, and Britain’s high streets are taken over by ethnic mafias.

This conflation of speaking with doing is bad enough when we’re talking HR policy. It’s worse when the task is to complete (say) a high-speed rail link on time and to budget. It’s worse again when it tacitly opts, even in the face of the documented, organized, gang-based, racially aggravated rape and torture of children, to go on ignoring the problem, perhaps in the hope that by doing so it will magically go away.

So it may be that the root cause of amnesiocracy, is simply that we’re governed by ideologically conformist arts graduates who shut out truth-seeking nerds from power, think words are the same as action, and wouldn’t recognize a workable construction schedule if it bit them on what Hugh of St Victor might have called their “nates”. Throw in a loss of institutional memory and a dose of common or garden nates-covering and hey presto. But this is the hopeful reading, as such a situation is not insuperable: in theory, we could course-correct by re-orienting government recruitment back toward the reality-based community.

Let us hope this is the case. For the alternative is far worse: that the rot goes all the way up. That no one is coming to save us, and we are governed at all levels by at best intellectual lightweights, or otherwise outright frauds, who know exactly what’s what but simply respond to awkward facts by deleting them from the record, and hoping the public forgets they ever asked.

In reality, Oxbridge interviews are nothing like this. Last year, I was hired to work as an interviewer for undergraduate admissions at one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. What an honor: only a decade ago, I had sat in the opposite chair, and tried not to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of power that the erudite stranger in front of me was able to exert over my future. Now, I had ascended to the role of interviewer; the sacred task of spotting academic potential had been entrusted to me.

A few weeks before the interviews, I was informed by an administrator that I would have to sit through a short online preparation suite. It was to take about two hours, and would instill in me, she promised, some of the Solomonic fair-mindedness that is required of the Oxford interviewer. Much of the suite’s content was reasonable, or at least harmless: a template to help us structure the interview, the usual salvo of unconscious bias tests, the helpful suggestion that we avoid mentioning the interviewee’s sexuality or ethnicity in our pre-interview chitchat.

To my surprise, however, the longest chunk of my “training” was devoted to various kinds of admonition. There was, I was reminded, a lot that could go wrong in interview settings. Increasingly, I was informed, students and parents were known to get litigious if they failed to secure a place in the long run.

The primary job of the interviewer, therefore, was to make sure that all his or her decisions were backed up by a paper trail of clear, transparent decision-making that proved that the selection procedure was fair. To this end, a handy list of “evaluation criteria” had been provided for each subject by the administrators: for every candidate, we ought to be prepared to provide a nice, clear list of boxes they had ticked upon subpoena or Freedom of Information request. Obediently, I began to click through screen after screen of standards, targets, benchmarks; vague reifications like “demonstration of analytic ability” vied with numerical scores denoting socioeconomic disadvantage.

I suspect that the rationale for this new regime of rubrics and targets can be found in the old stories of institutional hazing. After all, however well such outlandish interview techniques serve as anecdotes years later, they are hardly fair — at least if “fairness” is defined as the imposition of a nice, clear, non-arbitrary standard which all candidates have the same opportunity to prepare for, and to which all candidates are subjected equally.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel it was slightly absurd to take something as deliberately supple and formless as an interview — a scenario that is still prized by employers precisely because it allows them to see past the drab uniformity of the CV — and subject it to such rigid trammels. If we were simply going to ask candidates to tick pre-drawn boxes, then why not cut out the middleman and do away with interviews altogether? Nor, I began to suspect, was the new system even particularly fair: under the old regime, interviewers could seize upon whatever it was that the candidate seemed to be especially good at, or interested in, and follow the thread wherever it led them; now, they were constantly being yanked back by the rubric towards lines of questioning that would, inevitably, favor a certain kind of student over others. Viewed in this light, what we were calling “fairness” actually turned out to be something very different: protocol, paperwork, procedure.

Oxford may sit near the top of the great pyramid of British institutional prestige, but it is not alone in displaying this tendency to conflate “fairness” with pointless bureaucratization. I have a distinct memory of working as a secondary-school teacher, and handing back a wonderful, insightful essay on Hamlet, which I had been forced to award a C because it addressed the wrong “Assessment Objectives” as stipulated by the exam board. Nor is the trend even confined to education: Justin Welby’s Church of England, with its Synod-mandated “talent pipelines”, functions in much the same way, as does the Civil Service, with its ornate systems for ensuring regional equilibrium between fast-streamers. The result is that, increasingly, academics, teachers, priests, and countless other professionals end up interacting with their charges, parishioners or public in a spirit of bureaucratic guilt: “If it were up to me, I’d do it differently,” we sigh as we watch the face before us crumple into disappointment, “but I don’t make the rules.”

In education, at least, the adoption of fairness as an organizing principle is surprisingly recent. You certainly won’t find much mention of it in the great humanist educationalists like Humboldt, or Cicero — nor even the great egalitarian firebrands of the Sixties, like Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière, who tended to avoid metaphors that implied they were simply doling out some education-commodity.

In the UK, in fact, the fairness fetish only really took off in the Eighties, when a series of Thatcherite reforms standardized education across the country. The most dramatic intervention came in 1988, when the Education Reform Act homogenized national curricula, broke up schooling into a uniform sequence of national “Key Stages”, and laid the groundwork for Ofsted, with its byzantine edifice of fairness-promoting rules and stipulations. The other watchword during these years, propagated by Keith Joseph, the education secretary, was “accountability”. Education, it was argued, was to be transparent to society as a whole, its structures and values fully codified and immediately accessible to any would-be auditor — just like the best companies in the private sector, fresh from restructurings by McKinsey and Deloitte. Accountable schools were fair because they ensured children and parents alike always knew where the goalposts were; if they ended up undereducated, or unemployed, the only people they could blame were themselves.

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With this in mind, it suddenly becomes much easier to discern what is going on in institutions like Oxford: less an egalitarian revolution than a kind of managerial coup, carried out by an elite administrative class. Thatcher (and just about every politician since) was bound to support the shift to fairness through “accountability”: after all, such measures take away the power to decide what is good from teachers — who are hardly the natural allies of the Right, what with their penchant for labor organization and teaching the young to think for themselves — and give it instead to white-collar workers, neoliberalism’s natural constituency.

The “fairness”, in other words, is essentially rhetorical. What makes the rubrics and marks schemes and assessment objectives seem fair is not that their stipulations avoid favoring some candidates over others (clearly, they do), nor that they are systematic and holistic (they are just as arbitrary as any other system), not even that they are meaningfully “transparent” (after all, what does “demonstrates consistent analytic and evaluative ability” actually mean?). Rather, it is the fact that the people ultimately responsible for selection see themselves as impartial, capable of rising above the fray with a kind of serene bureaucratic neutrality. A commitment to “fairness”, we might say, is just a way for the administrative class to vest itself with the power of the judge.

As a result, administrators in places like Oxford like to propagate an entirely misguided sense of the way in which snobbery and elitism actually work today. Many people, it seems, are content to spout what is basically a recycled version of Pierre Bourdieu — the idea that wealthy people have “cultural capital” in the form of a sophisticated-sounding accent, decent Latin, a working knowledge of opera, etc., that makes them stand out in selection procedures despite not really deserving to do so. The rubrics, by this logic, are egalitarian because they prevent academics from falling head-over-heels for the first rich kid who name-drops Hegel in his interview.

But anyone who has spent time in an “elite” secondary school in the last 10 years knows that “cultural capital” is not the primary gift these institutions bestow. Wealthy parents don’t pay for their children to go to private schools so that they can learn more about Hegel or Humboldt or even Hamlet; they do it so that they can learn how to get good exam results and construct tight personal statements, which they hope, somewhere down the line, will be transubstantiated into a well-paying white-collar job. These days, in fact, the real marker of elevated social class is a kind of bureaucratic efficiency — the ability to navigate the rubrics and procedures that apportion success in the modern world, without losing the will to live. Even the kids who do slip through the net from difficult backgrounds tend to be the strivers, with their clean sweeps of exam results, rather than the dreamy, thoughtful kids who tend not to read the mark schemes in the first place.

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Thankfully Oxford, at least, has not done away with the role of the interviewer entirely (the same cannot be said of most US universities, where admission tends to depend entirely on personal statements and exam results). There still remains, despite the best efforts of some, a crucial unaccountability to the interview scenario: ultimately, what the interviewers are really looking for is a certain spark of insight or teachability, and most of them have enough rhetorical dexterity to find an analogue for this spark in whatever the administrators give them. The worry is that, by the time academics are able to exercise this discretion, it is too late: all students have been systematically undereducated, and have grown so adept at pandering to the structures designed to promote fairness and accountability in primary and secondary school that they have quite forgotten how to think. Already, vast numbers of students turn up at university unable to read or write properly — they simply flit, free-associatively, from mark-worthy buzzword to mark-worthy buzzword, just as the “assessment objectives” model teaches them. Vanishingly few of them are prepared to undertake the voyage into the unknown and ineffable that ends up producing the best prose.

Some kind of rediscovery of the virtues of “unaccountability” would benefit just about every institution in the US. It would encourage their members to take risks, think freely and flexibly, rather than simply regurgitating rubrics; it would, in other words, promote the kind of behavior which the US’s institutions, with their widely lamented slide towards unproductivity and managerial bloat, sorely needs. Plenty of plodders and pencil pushers would feel hard-done-by; the strivers, no doubt, would have to be stripped of their birthright. But if such reforms were carried out correctly, our institutions just might be able to reobtain a sense that what they do is valuable for its own sake. And what, really, could be fairer than that?

In the past few years, such tests have become unavoidable for any aspiring professional. As of 2017, 75 of The Times’s Top 100 UK companies used psychometric assessments as part of their recruitment strategies, and the year before last, the global industry that designs, administers and coaches these tests was valued at over nine billion dollars. No one can escape, if they want to get on in the white-collar world. University students regularly shell out sums greater than the average termly maintenance loan on slick preparatory courses, and adult career-switchers often have to take multiple days off work to participate in whatever “assessment suite” has been dreamed up by their prospective new employer.

The purveyors of these tests certainly seem sure of their efficacy. Pearson, the multi-billion-pound market-leader, informs prospective buyers that such tests are “seen as a successful tool for predicting job success”, and that “research shows that organizations can predict over 70% of performance [sic] by using the right tools”. Those professionals who have done well by them are equally optimistic: “It’s basically all about being logical,” a corporate lawyer tells me. “It suits me, because I have a very logical brain.”

Yet despite such convincing testimonies, it remains remarkably difficult to extract from these tests any kind of philosophically robust procedure. One study of one of the most popular “critical thinking” formats found that candidates with formal training in logic and the philosophy of language might actually be at a disadvantage compared to their more ignorant counterparts. What, we might reasonably ask, is going on?

Though there are, these days, nearly as many test formats as there are HR departments, a few clear market-leaders have emerged. The most widely assessed capacity seems to be “critical thinking” — a largely undefined term that seems to have something to do with reading chunks of text and sorting valid inferences from invalid ones. In the UK, at least, the most popular rubric is the notorious “Watson-Glaser” format, which forms the major criterion for entry into professions like law, but also underpins many of the verbal reasoning tests used in the educational system, such as TSA tests employed by Oxford and Cambridge and the UKCAT test that guards the gates of medical school. It is also comparatively ancient, originating in America’s Progressive Era, the high point of race realism, eugenics, degeneracy theory, and a host of other now-unfashionable beliefs in man’s capacity to measure and taxonomize his fellow man.

Here is a paradigmatic Watson-Glaser test question, which I have adapted from Pearson’s own website:

Statement: Two hundred school students in their early teens voluntarily attended a recent weekend student conference in Leeds. At this conference, the topics of race relations and means of achieving lasting world peace were discussed, since these were problems that the students selected as being most vital in today’s world.

Based on the statement above, evaluate the following inference: “As a group, the students who attended this conference showed a keener interest in broad social problems than do most other people in their early teens.”

A) True
B) Probably true
C) Insufficient data
D) Probably false
E) False

According to Pearson’s own marks scheme, this statement is “probably true” — “because, as is common knowledge, most people in their early teens do not show so much serious concern with broad social problems.”

But is this common knowledge? Having worked in a school myself, I am struck by the fact that, if anything, young people in this country are more attentive to broad social problems than their jaded elders, often saturated in online political talking-points to the point of downright unteachability. In fact, a plausible case can be made that the best answer is C) Insufficient data, on the basis that there is nothing about students’ interest in the prompt.

Such issues may seem trivial, but they stem from a deep philosophical incoherency in all the major critical thinking formats. Tests claim to be assessing analytic ability — that is, the ability to draw conclusions from logical premises, according to the ancient form of the syllogism: A is B; All Bs are C; therefore, A is C. But there is no “probably” in a syllogism. What ends up happening, then, is that applicants are invited to bring outside judgments about semantics and the probabilistic relations of natural facts on their answer.

This raises the question of what criteria the test-takers are meant to use to make such judgments. The preparatory course-providers set up complicated rubrics that they claim will help their students sort everything out: “Understanding the difference, between common knowledge (allowed in the inference section)” reads one handy guide on a popular site called JobTestPrep, “and other types of knowledge (not allowed) is what ultimately allows you to find the correct answers to questions”. Thus, from the fact “Dan is standing at the bus stop” we can make the “common knowledge” inference that “he is probably waiting for the bus” (other possibilities, such as “he is sheltering from the rain” are here deemed to be wild and unreasonable). We cannot infer, however, from the fact that “She is driving a BMW” that “she is probably rich”. This is not “common knowledge”, but “general knowledge” — which, apparently, is a totally different thing. Even if we wrap our heads around these distinctions, not one marks scheme I have consulted acknowledges that the word “probably” could just as easily denote a semantic uncertainty as an epistemological one. Candidates with a background in philosophy of language, for example, would likely perceive that words like “rich” are relative and depend on context; they would thus be more likely to include hedging words like “probably”, and thus fall afoul of the marks scheme in a different way.

In other critical thinking formats, this blindness to the way in which logic is underpinned by semantics yields even sillier results. Consider this question, from the “evaluation of arguments” section of the JobTestPrep website:

Evaluate the answer to the following question as STRONG or WEAK:

Q: Should a company grant its employees some free time to spend in any manner they choose?

A: No — employees are likely to use the free time to clean their homes, run errands, and meet with friends, and thus bring no benefit to the company whatsoever.

According to JobTestPrep, this is a strong argument. “It is important, as it refers to the benefit the company might (or might not) get from this policy.” Here, the “common knowledge” required is nothing less than a total and unquestioning identification, on the part of the test-taker, with the mercenary ethos of the shareholder corporation. The idea the word “should” might denote any other type of obligation — moral, perhaps — is totally impermissible.

The procedures underpinning the test-setters’ categorizations are not just difficult to divine: they are completely arbitrary. The poor test-takers end up desperately trying to channel the spirit of the test, spending vast amounts of time (and, conveniently, money) on test-prep programs in the hope of acquiring an instinctive sense of what the test-setting mandarins do and don’t think is self-evident. Needless to say, such arbitrariness encodes into the tests an immense cultural bias. If you come from a background similar to that of the test-setters, then you’ll likely do well. If you were raised in a different environment where, say, people are taught to believe themselves to have moral duties that extend into the limited-liability corporation, you will likely fail.

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Even more tellingly, the shiniest, newest professional aptitude tests increasingly do away with logical deduction altogether, and instead simply measure the test-taker’s spontaneous identification with official rubrics. This procedure is the core of the “Situational Judgment Test”, or “SJT”, that dominates hiring in healthcare and human resources, and even forms a major part of the UK Civil Service’s Fast Stream exam. In the SJT, it is the candidate’s “character” that is assessed, via an online widget that dreams up hypothetical workplace conflicts and asks candidates how they would respond. Test-takers are exhorted to “research company values” in advance — and, essentially, parrot the company’s own HR policies back at it.

Clearly, what this really amounts to is a perfect recipe for workplace conservatism: the company hires graduates who do exactly the kind of thing the procedures tell them to do, always. This would be one thing if the Civil Service was a paragon of leanness, efficiency and innovation. But does anyone in the UK really think this is the case? Incidentally, several civil servants inform me that almost no one in the Civil Service believes in the Fast Stream exam: most of these hiring practices were dreamed up by private outside consultancy firms with an obvious financial interest in the Civil Service’s stultification.

This institutionalized skull-measuring has the potential to wreak catastrophic effects. It is no secret that the UK is facing a slump in productivity, its vast firms with their swollen internal bureaucracies rapidly being overtaken by competition abroad. Thomas Piketty and Katharina Pistor have argued convincingly that most of what counts for growth these days is really sterile manipulation by the administrative class: changing the legal rules surrounding one’s assets to increase their value, lobbying for new schemes to siphon public money into one’s latest quixotic startup. Brett Christophers, meanwhile, has shown how the biggest, most profitable companies these days are more interested in extracting rents than making profits, precisely because no one is doing or making anything new or exciting enough to sell. Few, however, have noted that these are exactly the pathologies we would expect to find downstream of a selection procedure that prizes ploddingly interchangeable candidates and systematically overlooks those who think differently. How many of the UK’s sclerotic institutions could be rescued by taking in people who are able to think critically, rather than people who are good at “critical thinking”?

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When I put these objections to defenders of such tests, the response is uniform. Even if their methodologies aren’t fully understood, the Pearson website assures its doubters, the fact remains that such tests predict success; they are highly correlated to something called “outcomes”. Yet, when I look, there don’t seem to be robust studies proving anything of the sort — not least because the supplest and most interesting thinkers probably don’t score well enough to be given jobs in the first place. In any case, this fêted correlation could be attributed to the simple fact that “critical thinking” tests reliably weed out a few illiterate candidates. The results of a spelling test would correlate to professional success, too.

Arguably, given the well documented racial and social disparities in the UK’s professional services sector, so too would outright prejudice. One of the most astonishing facts about the literature defending the Watson-Glaser test is that it actually acknowledges that this is the case: different cultural and ethnic groups tend to achieve vastly different results. Of course, this is entirely to be expected if most of what is being measured is the test taker’s cultural proximity to the test-setter; the high priests of psychometry, however, remain determined to find a way to make their discipline seem compatible with the egalitarian ethos of the average HR department. One report by Imperial College London admits that “Pearson Vue’s own literature on the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Assessment reports… ethnicity ha[s] been previously associated with differential group performance on the test,” only to observe that “there was no difference between groups when predicting [career] progression”. Thus, the report concludes, the playing field can be leveled via various baroque DEI initiatives. In other words: yes, the tests seem to be racially biased, but you needn’t worry because the tests don’t actually work, so you can impose whatever quotas you like in the name of compliance without feeling too guilty. Conveniently, most of the companies that sell professional assessment suites seem to be hawking “equality and diversity” services too.

Ultimately, professional assessors are guilty of making not one, but two of the great philosophical errors of our time. First, they mistake the fact that tests give quantifiable results for the idea that such results are somehow objective. Second, they assume that facts about the world can be derived from pure logic, without any theory of semantics intervening. These assumptions run rampant in the culture these days, animating everyone from online IQ fetishists to drab technocrats who think that everything can be solved with a nice, healing dose of economics. Anyone with a shred of philosophical training knows enough to question them — indeed, if one traces back the genealogy of “critical” thought far enough, one arrives at the work of Immanuel Kant, whose entire philosophical project aimed to show how “pure” or “logical” reasoning is always infected by a priori structures that it cannot itself justify.

Sadly, however, academic humanities like philosophy seem to be the one type of discipline that employers are determined not to take into consideration in their hiring procedures. This is a shame: to an unparalleled extent among branches of human knowledge, the humanities involve a questioning of abstract categories and measurement systems by which we parse and understand the world, and a consideration of whether the questions we are asking in our more mundane, technical pursuits are even the right questions. They are thus the perfect antidote to the inane proceduralism, the waterlogged bureaucracy, the creeping sense of stagnation, that haunt the contemporary workplace. If people really want to galvanize an organization, they should start trying to rediscover some of this critical, humanistic spirit, and do away with whatever crude new solution the latest smarmy consultant has sold them. Ditch Watson and Glaser; hire a few Kant scholars instead. Maybe then, one day, the students in college cafés like mine will be able to close their test-prep software and get back in the libraries where they belong.

Britain is a country with moderate natural resources and moderate human capital. Where we have excelled is in the strength of our institutions. But the effective delivery of public services depends on the capability, motivation and organisation of public servants, and right now, that can’t consistently be counted on.

So what’s changed? I joined the Civil Service not long before the financial crash when, despite the relatively low salary, good roles attracted smart graduate talent because the work was interesting, often prestigious, and because people had a stake in the ultimate outcome — the successful functioning of the state.

That balance has shifted as years of pay restraint, combined with soaring living expenses, especially in London, have affected the calibre of staff. I know many excellent public servants who have left to triple their wages in the private sector. As a result, the country is getting fewer of our best people and state capability is suffering.

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Troublingly, this isn’t just a question of splashing the cash. Even if there were budget to spare (which there won’t be), rebuilding and remotivating the workforce would be tricky. This is partly because the problem isn’t just a numbers one. It’s an attitude one. Even though the overall size and composition of the Civil Service today does not look that different from when I joined, some of the cultural norms — or “expected behaviours” — are unrecognisable. The most noticeable change is how comfortable younger cohorts have become with publicly expressing ideological views.

The politics of identity is by no means unique to the public sector, but it is uniquely problematic within it. To take one example, it is common to see pronouns attached to the email signatures of public servants. This does not concern me because of what it tells us about those public servants’ views of gender, but because it tells us something about their views. Public servants should be aware that exposing their institutions to accusations of ideological capture, by any type of political persuasion, is damaging.

Stephen Webb, a former Cabinet Office Director, points out that ambiguity around employers’ legal position makes the hierarchy hesitant to challenge any exhibitionist public-sector behaviours, such as displaying pronouns (sometimes incongruously overlapping with the wearing of Palestinian flags and other signalling devices). Or maybe the leadership feels it’s nothing more than passive social compliance and, therefore, not worth the fight. But the effect should not be dismissed. While it’s hard to imagine this kind of signalling leading to any of the outcomes proponents want to see, normalising this sort of ideological signalling has given licence to a growth in cause based, non-work activities in the workplace, which draws focus from core business. Inevitably it also affects productivity.

Such behaviour also blurs the distinction between passive exhibitionism and more overt acts of ideological capture. This could be seen when some civil servants in the Department for Business and Trade decided that, of all the countries to whom we export military equipment, they should threaten to refuse to process export licences to Israel. There is a balance to be struck between engaging sincerely with employees to get the best out of them, and pandering to the latest TikTok cause and its pseudo intellectual underpinnings.

And while the majority of public servants are passionate and professional, their jobs become increasingly difficult when the behaviour of their colleagues degrades their institution’s legitimacy. The Met Police, for example, were already struggling to defend themselves against accusations of permitting antisemitic and intimidating behaviour during the Palestine marches; something which has been made all the harder now one of their most senior advisors has been shown chanting “from the river to the sea”. Either these public servants do not understand that the role of public service is to serve the whole public, or they believe that ideological actions are more worthwhile than their jobs’ substance.

Or perhaps there is another motivating factor. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural science, argued that there is a difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” (that is how the process of retrieving memories is prone to bias, meaning the impression we have of our past experiences can be different from how they really happened). Since, for many, the experience of real life now comes second to the way life can be presented online, I would argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a third “self” — the “representing self” — who experiences life in anticipation of how the experience can be represented on social media.

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The decisions people make have long been influenced by what they think those decisions say about them, but social media has magnified this human frailty to such an extent it has changed the way consumer markets function: people participate in activities, choose their holidays and even adjust their worldview very conscious of how this will make them appear to their chosen identity grouping. Studies have shown a link between narcissistic traits and modern Western activism and — sadly — professionalism is no longer a barrier to this type of vanity: it motivates the choices some make in the workplace (as anyone who has had the misfortune to use LinkedIn will know). This, though, should not be the case in public service. If ideological distractions are permitted, it allows employees to show they feel more connected to ideology-based identity groups than to the communities and national community they are employed to serve.

Shifting behaviours and organisational culture is hard, though, particularly when the barriers to sacking employees is high. But the stakes for the country are even higher. We have many exceptional public servants, who feel increasingly let down by the overall effectiveness of their institutions and we risk losing them to better paying work. So we need leaders who will reclaim responsibility for institutional culture from HR departments and will lead by example. Who will promote the talented and be empowered to sack those who are failing. Our public institutions have been allowed to crumble and if an incoming government fails to retain and reward those who can rebuild the legitimacy of these services, those electoral promises won’t be worth the paper they were written on.

I have worked in a government department for the past 33 years, but it was only in 2008 that I became aware that the unions not always on the side of their members. HR had sent round an intimidating email urging us all to complete our online diversity data: if we didn’t complete it by a specific date, we were told that out names would be added to “a list of non declarers”. That list would then be passed on to senior management. “In addition,” it said, “HR may contact non declarers by phone to update their details on the system there and then.”

Many of us immediately forwarded the email to our union, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), both to complain about the threatening tone of the email and to ask why the department needed to know such things as our “sexual orientation” or “religious belief”. Many of us also logged into our online HR profile and removed any existing diversity data we’d already completed.

The majority of us heard nothing in response. But one regional union rep in our building not only received a reply — that essentially this was voluntary data management which then union would also like us to complete — but the message also contained some of the disparaging emails being sent between senior union officials.

One exchange read:

“Clarification does need sending out as soon as possible. The members who have raised this with me are, at the moment, quite adamant that they will not supply this information especially given the way the e-mail was worded. This attitude will obviously soften with time especially when the “non-compliants” are interrogated over the phone by HRS.  If a reasoned argument can be provided by us as to why they should freely give the required information, but explaining that you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, then HRS will still get their answers. But at least we don’t look like we are supporting the way they’re carrying out this caper which is the impression people are getting…”

Once the email came to light, our HR department apologised and emphasised that the data grab was voluntary. But in many ways, that was only the start. Fast forward to 2014 and the roll-out of unconscious bias training (UBT) throughout the civil service. This, as with the supplying of diversity data, wasn’t mandatory, though many were led to believe it was. Again I contacted my union to complain that management was forcing some kind of Orwellian thought-training upon us, that I was refusing to do it, and to ask them if they would back me if I faced pressure to complete it or was threatened with disciplinary action for refusing.

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In response, a PCS official phoned to tell me that the union backed the introduction of UBT. I was told the union’s officials had completed it, didn’t see my issue with it and would not support me if I faced any action from management. To which I replied: if that was the case, then he and the union were part of the problem.

But it was only after searching through the PCS website that I realised how much of the problem the union really was. I quickly came across several articles and even a conference motion from 2013 that demanded UBT be made mandatory for all staff. In effect, PCS were demanding intrusion into our very thought processes and, in the process, handing employers a means of disciplining us based on highly politicised, subjective and flawed evidence of “unconscious bias”.

Then, fortunately, in December last year it was announced that that UBT was to be scrapped throughout the civil service in England, after a Government Equality Office investigation found that it can actually “backfire” and reinforce stereotypes and biases. In any normal world, the scrapping of UBT would have been praised by those who value freedom of thought and conscience in the workplace.

Not so the deputy general secretary of Prospect, a union for civil service professionals, who told the Guardian: “While there is a debate as to the effectiveness of unconscious bias training, simply scrapping it without setting out alternative ways to combat discrimination in the work place is not acceptable.” His concern was shared by the assistant general secretary of the senior civil service FDA union, who told the BBC’s Politics Live that “to remove it without replacing it with anything seems absolutely illogical”.

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Critical Race Theory's new disguise

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But the story doesn’t end there. Perhaps in anticipation of UBT being scrapped, or aware of its discrediting, the civil service unions were busy behind the scenes collaborating on a replacement — in the form of a new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) eLearning module, which was rolled out to us in September 2020. However, unlike with its predecessor, at least this time the collaboration between the unions and management was stated openly; we were informed that we had until the 31 December 2020 to complete it. (I am yet to do so.)

No doubt HR thought that highlighting the unions’ collaboration would give the training greater credibility. But to me it was evidence of our unions’ insultingly low opinion of their members and the wider workforce. That is, rather than seeing us as a collective solution to workplace problems, including in tackling discrimination, we are made to feel like would-be bigots who need to be saved from ourselves.

So, to return to the UCU’s disgraceful lack of support for Kathleen Stock, I would have been more shocked if her union had supported her right to think what she likes and express those opinions freely. But until the unions overcome their own conscious prejudices against the workforce, and stop collaborating with management to impose increasingly discredited diversity initiatives upon us, don’t expect them to defend freedom of thought and conscience in the workplace anytime soon.

British politics is turning upside down. Conservative support is growing in the North and among working class voters, while Labour has made progress in parts of the South and among the middle class voters.

Unluckily for Sir Keir, the Labour gains aren’t enough to offset the Tory advance. The electoral map isn’t inverting completely. It’s getting bluer at the top, but, like a disappointed baboon, it’s not much redder at the bottom.

Except that from a ministerial desk in Whitehall, things might not seem that way. With younger, London-based graduates leaning evermore to the Left, then, for Tory ministers, enemy-held territory starts right outside the office door.

The Conservatives maybe the “natural party of government”, but things have been tense with the civil service ever since Margaret Thatcher proclaimed her intention to “roll back the frontiers of the state”.

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Though the Tories have been busy of late rolling those frontiers forward again, this hasn’t made the relationship with civil servants any easier. In fact, the relationship is acquiring paranoid undertones. Only last weekend, a story appeared in the Mail on Sunday alleging the existence of a Labour spy ring somewhere in Whitehall. That’s almost certainly nonsense, but one can see why ministers might be feeling a little jumpy.

In any workplace, it helps if you feel that you and your colleagues are on the same side. But in Whitehall, that’s rather in doubt. Certainly, the politicians are outnumbered. There are about a hundred ministers, but hundreds of thousands of civil servants.

Of course, the civil servants that matter most to ministerial life are only a small fraction of the overall number. Most immediately there are those who sit in the minister’s Private Office. This is a misleading name, because there’s nothing private about it. Apart from the occasional special advisor or speechwriter, a minister has very little control over the staff who literally surround him, or her. As soon as he walks out of his physical office, there they are waiting for him — people appointed by someone else to provide an all-enveloping interface with the outside world.

That “someone else”, by the way, is the department’s Permanent Secretary — whose own office and staff are never very far away.

These are the most politically-sensitive parts of the civil service and they take extreme care to be politically neutral — and to be seen as such. Nevertheless, civil servants are people too and people have opinions. So how many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing?

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Well, judging from my own experience of working in two government departments, I would say approximately all of them. Not that you need any special insight here. You only have to walk around a ministerial Private Office to get the picture. The staff are young — most of them in their twenties and thirties. They’re all university educated — largely in the humanities and social sciences — and thus have been wokishly catechised. To purchase this dubious privilege, they’ve had to take out hefty student loans, which they’re now paying back out of their modest salaries. Of their remaining money, most of it is paid to some landlord to rent a room in an overpriced London suburb. So, yes, of course they’re Lefties.

If the hyperactive fools who run Downing Street weren’t so concerned with backroom politics and conspiracy theories, then they might want do something about a system that churns out a hostile graduate workforce from which the civil service is recruited. But why engage in serious systemic reform when you can be briefing out cock-and-bull stories to the tabloid press?

Going to war with the civil service as it is now would be a terrible mistake for the Government. Whether or not Whitehall harbours hardcore Lefties leaking secrets to Labour is unimportant, because they’re not representative of the civil service as whole. Even among London-based public sector professionals there is more than one kind of Left-winger — and it’s important to distinguish between them.

It has become fashionable for pollsters to divide the country not just by party preference (which can change), but also by ‘political tribe’ which reflects underlying values. For instance, research conducted for More in Common identifies seven political tribes — from “Progressive Activists” to “Backbone Conservatives”.

It’s tempting to place our younger civil servants in the “Progressive Activist” category — which is the most Leftwing of the seven tribes. This grouping is notorious for its disproportionately gobby presence on social media. However, our civil servants — especially those working in Private Offices — are anything but outspoken in their opinions. If activism is your thing, then the civil service, (which is more into passivism) couldn’t be a worse career choice.

If there is a political tribe that our civil servants naturally belong to, it’s a group called the “Civic Pragmatists”. This tribe is also Left-leaning, but unlike the “Progressive Activists” they’re far from confrontational. More in Common describes them as “a group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics… they are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.”

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The civil service might not always attract the most adventurous of souls, but many of its recruits are looking for more than a regular pay check — they also want to do something meaningful and public spirited with their lives.

From a Conservative viewpoint, the real danger is not that these people are subversives. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Far from wanting to smash the system, they’re all too inclined to perpetuate well-meaning, but stagnant, public sector orthodoxies. As such, they become absorbed into the Whitehall ‘blobs’ that stand in the way of meaningful reform.

Is there anything that a reforming Conservative government can do about this? One way is for ministers and their special advisors to challenge the system, Cummings-style. But while I’m all for a spot of creative confrontation, true change comes from persistence of effort. And as long as ministers and their advisors are moved every few years (or months) that will be cut short. And don’t forget that any civil servants that fully get behind a particular reform effort will get moved too — and thus reabsorbed into the blob.

There is a way forward, however, which is to restructure bits of government around the delivery of strategic missions. This would allow the most entrepreneurial and idealistic civil servants to be recruited with the promise that their dedication to a reforming project will be properly recognised and rewarded over the long-term. Given the shining example of the vaccine development and procurement programme, there’s never been a better to promote a mission-led government.

Of course, that approach would require Conservative politicians to accept that the state can be a solution as well as a problem. Hopefully, that’s not too Leftwing an idea for them to swallow.

I used to work in the House of Commons — occasionally late into the evening. The empty, darkened corridors gave me the creeps, but I never saw anything too unusual. Metaphorically though, the place is full of ghosts. You try not to look, but they’re always there. Waiting. Whispering. Reaching out.

Like the unquiet spirit of Cathy Earnshaw, they’re forever tapping at the window. Worst of all is when they bear the faces of the departed: former colleagues, ex-MPs, past Prime Ministers, even. They’re not actually dead, of course, but they have gone over to the “other side”, from politics to  — shudder — public affairs.

The latest spectre to haunt the corridors of power is a very familiar face: David Cameron. I almost feel sorry for the guy. For the second time in his career, he’s become the symbol of a systemic failure.

The first time was Brexit, of course — but now there’s something else that won’t go away: a lobbying scandal.

To blame one individual for these outcomes is to ignore the guilt of the entire political establishment. And yet, on both occasions, Cameron has practically demanded the role of bogeyman.

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In respect to Brexit, he was the one who called the referendum. In respect to lobbying, no contemporary politician has done more to define it as an issue of concern. He didn’t just give a speech on the subject, but the speech. It was in 2010, shortly before he became Prime Minister, when he condemned the “far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”. He was crystal clear as to what he meant by this:

“I’m talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism. We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism.”

Having spent several years as a speechwriter, I can tell you that politicians don’t always write their own speeches; but you’d think that Cameron might have noticed what he was saying when he said it. To warn about the “next big scandal waiting to happen” and then become that scandal takes a special kind of insouciance.

To be clear, there’s no evidence that he’s broken any law. However, his speech wasn’t about what’s legally wrong with lobbying, but what’s morally wrong about it. Cronyism doesn’t just endanger free and fair competition, but also public faith in the democratic process. Or as he said back in 2010: “It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest.”

In his defence, his government did introduce legislation on the issue — the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. Unfortunately, it didn’t go nearly far enough.

The Act’s key weakness is that it only really deals with one kind of lobbying — “consultant lobbying”. Any lobbying outfit that meets the legal definition must join the Register of Consultant Lobbyists — which is regulated by the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists.

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Ironically, it is Cameron himself who demonstrates the narrowness of the legislation. He was accused of acting as an unregistered consultant lobbyist, but the regulator investigated and concluded that he had not. His dealings with Australian financier Lex Greensill clearly do not break his own law.

There’s also a voluntary Lobbying Register, managed by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, which “individual lobbyists and organisations” are encouraged to join. You can explore it here. For instance, if you run a search on Mark Oaten — the former Lib Dem MP — you get this entry. Try searching for David Cameron, however, and you get zero results.

Neither the legislation nor self-regulation is achieving the transparency that the former Prime Minister promised in the 2010 speech, when he pledged to make “sure that ex-ministers are not allowed to use their contacts and knowledge — gained while being paid by the public to serve the public — for their own private gain.”

It’s not just ex-ministers, of course. At any one time there are thousands of lobbyists at work in and around the Palace of Westminster, many of whom used to work there in a non-lobbying capacity. They’re drawn from all ranks — from ex-researchers right up to ex-premiers.

Some are a nuisance. Others are useful. A few are brilliant — a genuine loss to proper politics. But all are tolerated. That’s not just out of respect to fallen comrades, but self-interest too.

That’s partly because there’s no career structure in politics. At every turn, one’s path is strewn with sudden exits. Most professions have more room at the bottom than the top, but it’s hard to think of any other career that’s more likely to chew you up and spit you out at every stage. The music industry might be the best comparison. There’s more than one reason why “politics is show business for ugly people”.

It’s even worse for those who exit politics in middle age. I’m not sure who said it first, but there’s nothing as “ex” as an ex-MP.

And that’s why the public affairs industry plays such an indispensable role in our political system. Unlike most other employers, it rewards public service. Indeed, the longer and more senior that service, the greater the reward. As annoying as some lobbyists might be, their presence is also reassuring. Those in Westminster’s land-of-the-living know that, one day, they too might need a place in the political afterlife.

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How Starmer can beat the Tories

By Peter Franklin

It’s therefore vital that we establish a clearer boundary between the two worlds. As in Christian theology, the living must stay on one side of the great divide and the dead on the other.

That means providing long-lasting careers for politicians — not so much for their sakes, but for ours. We’ve had a professional permanent government — i.e. the civil service — for more than a century. It’s high time that we ended amateur hour on the political side of public administration too. After all, our MPs are responsible for the scrutiny of legislation, the stewardship of hundreds of billions of pounds and for life-and-death decisions affecting millions of people.

If — like other countries — we had local governments that could truly shape the development of their communities, parliamentary committees that could propose and pass legislation, and think tanks with the permanence and heft of academic institutions; then there might be more to politics than the greasy pole of ministerial preferment. We’d be able to reward public service with the purpose and respect it deserves.

In any comparable field, we’d demand decades of experience from those at the top. Not politics though. An individual like David Cameron went from a job in PR to become an MP in 2001. Within four years he was Leader of the Opposition. And within nine, Prime Minister. Six years later he was out of politics altogether, with half his adult life still ahead of him. How can that possibly end well?

The message is simple: My side is allowed to have double standards. My opponents are not.

This level of political and intellectual contortion may be entertaining to watch, but it has serious implications. Slowly and steadily the party activists and ministers who peddle this line are contorting the very concept of political independence out of existence. Alex Allan, who wrote the report into Priti Patel’s behaviour, was known as the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards. His departure suggests there is no place for independence in this Number 10.

We have reached a level of partisanship in our politics that makes it truly hard for many of our political leaders to even conceptualise what it might mean to be independent. It’s the politics of medieval warlords: unless you are on our side, you must be our sworn enemy. And while it is the Right putting this into practice, it is the Left which has created an entire intellectual architecture for this mode of thinking in the shape of critical theory. When deployed in the service of political movements, it means: you’re a trans ally or a transphobe, you’re an Anti Racist or you’re a racist, you believe in Modern Monetary Theory or you’re a neoliberal capitalist sellout.

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By Polly Mackenzie

It is astonishing to me to see formerly serious, sensible Conservatives getting sucked into this vortex, and yet in defence of Priti Patel they have. She only shouted at civil servants in the first place because they refused to do her bidding as part of a deep state conspiracy against Brexit, apparently. Alex Allan’s report is not independent, it’s a continued effort in the war against Brexit: senior civil servants trying to take down a popular minister securing a popular agenda.

This is what these Priti-protectors want us to believe: there is a Deep State. It is against Brexit. Civil servants are strongly against doing popular policies because they want to be despised. Civil servants who work in the Home Office, dedicating their lives to policing and security, are firmly opposed to Priti Patel’s agenda to increase policing and tighten security law. The Deep State has decided, at the eleventh hour, to make a final attempt to sabotage Brexit by trying to remove a Minister (who has very little to do with Brexit), while leaving the Prime Minister (who led the Brexit campaign) well alone.

It reminds me of the old Sherlock Holmes adage: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth.” Flip it around: to convince yourself that something implausible is true, you have to first convince yourself that the more plausible alternatives are, in fact, impossible. That’s the magic trick partisanship has pulled off.

It has made it feel literally impossible to believe that Alex Allan is a genuinely independent mind, giving an unbiased opinion. It is impossible to believe that a civil servant who messes up or gets confused or makes a mistake is just a bit useless. And even more impossible to believe that a civil servant who says a policy won’t work is giving accurate, independent advice, instead of pursuing a partisan agenda.

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Are special advisers just gossiping grifters?

By Polly Mackenzie

There are some civil servants who don’t particularly like this government: of course. But they don’t stay to sabotage. If they really care, but don’t want to lose the pension, they disappear from the centre and trot off to work on eggs policy or widget regulation for a few years. The vast majority just carry on, and they take their job as loyal servants to their minister extremely seriously. I know this because I worked in a government — the coalition — where there was a Deputy Prime Minister whose very job description included “stopping the Prime Minister and his Cabinet from doing stuff we disagree with”.

That coalition did many things that the Deep State is supposedly against, and for once it had a democratically legitimate ally right in the heart of Whitehall. If the Deep State existed, it would have leveraged us. And yet in five years, our overwhelming experience in engaging with departments was their utter loyalty to their minister, and their minister’s choices, however loopy. In five years there was literally one occasion when we received covert information from a department: from a very junior civil servant who happened to be friends with someone in the DPM’s office. It wasn’t even very useful.

Our civil service is not perfect, but it is independent of politics and loyal to the government of the day. But it isn’t enough for me to believe that. It needs to be believed by ministers, by Parliament, and by the public too. Independence that used to be held up as one of the great accomplishments of the British state but now it is viewed with scepticism by partisans who believe we must all take sides. Partisans who cannot comprehend how to not take sides, or believe failing to do so is collaborating with the enemy. Partisans who say they would never be friends with an MP on the Conservative benches, or believe going on a Pride march is equivalent to trying to overthrow the government.

Independence used to be an aspirational word: while it was never a roaring commercial success, the Independent newspaper captured the spirit of what it meant to be independent: free from fear or favour. The fortunes of the concept have been mirrored by the publication: now it only exists online and it no longer has an independent agenda but mostly parrots the platitudes of the new Left.

We need to fight back against the idea that independence is mindlessness. It is, in fact, the only way to be open minded. Partisans hate to be reminded of the evidence, chronicled in The Political Brain, that taking a political side alters your brain so that you respond emotionally, instead of logically, to facts. To remain independent is to remain flexible, to be free to respond to new evidence and new ideas.

The real danger to the good governance of the nation is not too many independent civil servants, or some imagined Deep State. It is those who have taken sides, closed their minds, and granted themselves the freedom to make, with impunity, the mistakes for which they want their enemies punished.