Priti Patel is right to fight the plotting of the mandarin class
The war that has broken out in the Home Office is the first major engagement since the general election between the reforming forces of government and the obstructionist Civil Service. Although the conflict has been personalised by interested parties representing it as having been provoked by the character and behaviour of Home Secretary Priti Patel, the issues at stake are much more far-reaching than a localised incompatibility between a secretary of state and a permanent secretary.
The real issue is: who governs Britain? Is it the electorate, through the delegated authority of an elected government, or is it the Whitehall mandarinate? The ruthlessness with which that mandarinate will defend its power is illustrated by the brutal briefing against Priti Patel. The usual anonymous sources have poured poison into the ears of commentators, suggesting that the Home Secretary was “bullying” and “belittling officials” and creating a climate of fear in her department.
The most archetypal criticism, however, and which bears the imprint of its authors, is the claim that Patel is out of her depth. That smacks of the classic senior civil service complacency that regards ministers as amateurs and officials as professionals. Technically, there is some truth in that perception, but it is designed to lend synthetic authority to civil servants and reinforce their self-regard. Who contributes more to the public wellbeing – an intelligent, visionary and dedicated minister with a strong electoral mandate or a production-line senior civil servant with his heels dug in to defend the sclerotic status quo?
Priti Patel is, unlike too many of her colleagues even in the wake of the general election cull, a genuine conservative determined to break the teeth of the leftward-turning ratchet and claw back power from the progressive consensus, rather than treading water as too many Tory administrations have been content to do in the past. The claim that the security services were withholding classified information from the Home Secretary on the grounds of distrusting her was a measure of the extreme lengths to which her enemies will go.
The breadth and sensitivity of her department’s remit mean that the stakes are vertiginously high. Immigration, the courts system, prisons, police, freedom of movement – and of speech – are all responsibilities exercised by the Home Office which relate closely to most of the issues of social policy that preoccupy the left. As early as his tenure of the post, Roy Jenkins demonstrated how crucial it was in implementing his “civilised society”, the embryo from which grew the dystopian nightmare that is the lunar landscape of “woke” British institutions today.
The fear that a counter-revolutionary such as Priti Patel could use the same mechanisms to unravel the progressive settlement provokes liberals to extreme measures. “Liberals”, in this context, means civil servants. How many non-liberals are there in the upper echelon of the civil service? About the same proportion as at the BBC, one might guess.
If there is one clichéd hypocrisy above all others that is nauseating and insulting to the intelligence it is the mantra routinely uttered by (usually retired) officials and media fellow travellers: “We are fortunate in Britain in enjoying the benefits of a highly professional, dedicated and completely neutral Civil Service.”
That fantasy was exploded, albeit humorously, as long ago as the first series of “Yes, Minister”. Anybody who has had dealings with our marvellously neutral civil service while attempting to pursue anything remotely resembling a Conservative agenda will testify to the well-practised obstruction, obfuscation, delays and distractions with which the entrenched officials, deeply conscious of their permanence and of ministers’ and administrations’ transience, jealously protect their God-given right to rule Britain.
More accurately, they are defending their right to manage Britain’s decline. Since the War it has been an article of faith among the official class that Britain is a permanently declining society, falling deservedly from the eminence of empire into preordained insignificance, reliant for any vestige of influence on membership of supranational bodies such as the European Union. The notion of Britain succeeding as an independent state is absurd, “extreme nationalist”, “fascist” or, in their most infantile terminology, a “unicorn”.
The leftist mentality behind this masochist world view is that Britain acted immorally in creating an Empire and is doomed to purge its guilt by surrendering its independence, borders, demography and culture to compensate the innumerable peoples against which it offended. Even a society in permanent decline, however, requires a power structure and to whom could the responsibility of decline management more sensibly be entrusted than to the bien-pensant possessors of straight “A”s and starred Firsts in PPE from the Oxbridge Sir Humphrey production line?
Just five years ago, denouncing the influence – even the existence – of the Deep State attracted knee-jerk accusations of conspiracy theory. Yet the conspiracy is open and unashamed. Nominally Conservative governments may come and go, but the mandarins go on forever, invulnerable to electoral resentment. Their influence is all-pervasive and their power of obstruction formidable. At ground level they are highly skilled in employing a thousand devices and ploys to reinforce their control.
To take one tiny example, at close of play on a weekday in a government ministry any special adviser worth his salt will take care to secure the red box that will accompany his minister home that evening, containing papers for her to work on. In the privacy of his room the adviser will carefully lift all the papers out of the box, place them on his desk and, like a professional card player, reshuffle them until all the material that was at the bottom of the box is at the top and the papers it has replaced are at the bottom.
This is because officials place papers dealing with issues on which they take a view, most often government policy of which they disapprove, at the bottom of the red box so that by the time the minister reaches them he will be tired and inclined to be more perfunctory in his scrutiny. Fatigue may also make him less likely to question the persuasive claims made by officials in accompanying minutes and more prone to approve proposals that may help to vitiate his own government’s policy.
After a short while, officials will notice that their sequencing of papers is being disrupted; they will then resort to putting the sensitive material back on top, or in the middle of the pile, in the hope that the special adviser may carelessly persist in his routine. And so the game of Whitehall poker continues ad infinitum. Some people criticise the adversarial politics of the House of Commons as detrimental to the public interest. How would they characterise the trench warfare to which every government of a conservative tenor is subjected?
What will particularly have energised Home Office officials in attempting to undermine Priti Patel is her robust determination to prevent the Supreme Court usurping the power of every other arm of government – Parliament, the executive, the Queen, even the electorate – by transforming itself into a Venezuelan-style constitutional court.
This is the greatest single threat to democratic governance in Britain today and the Home Secretary has made it clear she is aware of this menace. It remains to be seen whether she – and Boris – have the staying power to crush judicial activism and reassert the traditional constitution in the face of resistance from the mandarin class. As the unprecedented lengths to which the decline managers have already gone in their attempts to destabilise Priti Patel’s tenure of office shows, the stakes could not be higher.