Who do you send for when the mountain of flowers left by mourners at the gates of Kensington Palace for Diana, Princess of Wales threatens to catch fire from the heat of its decomposition? Or when you need to persuade a thousand senior Whitehall officials that they can no longer park on Horseguards? Or set up a National Lottery? Take action on Press Regulation? Find a compromise on party political funding? Or abolish the role of lord chancellor without rewiring the entire constitution?
For more than 30 years, the answer to all these challenges and many more was to call for Hayden Phillips.
The “mandarin’s mandarin”, one of the most influential Whitehall officials of his time, or “an oily Welshman” in the words of one disgruntled MP (Phillips was not Welsh), he was a byword in the corridors of power for his appetite for good living and the range of his contact book.
When Margaret Thatcher wanted to find £50m from public funds to spend on the Thyssen art collection, Phillips – a Treasury official at the time – immediately called the director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor, to ask what his priority purchase for the nation would be if he had £50m.
According to Phillips’ memoir, armed with MacGregor’s advice, he advised Thatcher that the Thyssen collection was not value for money. In the event the government offered for the collection, but it eventually went to Madrid.
An enthusiastic amateur actor, he had a cameo role as a Spectre double agent – through personal contacts, obviously – in the 2021 Bond movie, No Time to Die. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had played Sir Humphrey in an annual charity review based on the TV series Yes Minister. Some in the audience wondered how much acting was needed, particularly since Jim Hacker’s role was taken by Charlie Falconer, at the time his secretary of state at the Department for Constitutional Affairs.
But beneath the bonhomie and charm Phillips, who has died aged 83, was a serious civil servant with the appetite and the capacity for big jobs that took him to within a hair’s breadth of the peak of Whitehall as cabinet secretary. Perhaps he missed out because of an earlier decision to take an opportunity that might have been designed with him in mind – to set up in 1992 what began as the Department for National Heritage and later, under the Blair government, became the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
The job entailed stitching together bits and pieces from several other departments, a mission calling for exactly the kind of sinuous negotiating skills for which he was already famous (or notorious, if you were on the losing end). It was complicated by the lack of resources that had left some of the UK’s most prominent cultural institutions relying on buckets to catch leaks when it rained. A partial answer was the creation of a National Lottery in 1994 accompanied by the careful construction of a firewall to prevent the funds it raised being used to replace government grant.
Phillips’ tenure as permanent secretary for the good things in life lasted from 1992 until 1998, years that embraced the fire at Windsor Castle in 1992, when he allowed his secretary of state Peter Brooke to say the government would pick up the tab for its restoration – a position from which they rapidly had to retreat in the face of an angry public reaction – and the death of Diana in 1997.
With ultimate responsibility for the Royal Parks, the department had to make big calls about crowd management in the days leading up to the funeral – hence the dilemma over moving the floral tributes that had begun to constitute a fire hazard. (It was resolved by announcing that the flowers would be composted, and the soft toys sent to children’s charities).
In 1998 the top job in Whitehall, cabinet secretary, became vacant. Phillips was an also-ran. He hoped to win a consolation prize as permanent secretary at the Home Office, but he was rejected by the home secretary, Jack Straw.
Just as he was considering early retirement, the opportunity came to move to the Lord Chancellor’s Department. It was at the start of a tumultuous series of developments in the relationship between the administration of the law and parliament, and parliament and the devolved assemblies. Phillips had no legal background at all (primary legislation was required even to allow him to become permanent secretary).
It was also the time of the abolition of the right of hereditary peers to sit. Unsurprisingly, the most arcane electoral system in the world, which until its abolition this year allowed the small group of “legacy” hereditary peers to replace themselves, was designed on Phillips’ watch.
The hereditaries’ electoral system was typical of his capacity for finding compromises, which smoothed the extraordinary transformation of the responsibilities of his department over the next four years.
Falconer, who replaced Derry Irvine as lord chancellor, came to value him as his personal human shield against the bitter opposition of almost the entire judiciary. In the face of the kind of radical reform that might once have been defeated by internal resistance, Phillips’ loyalty to his political bosses was unfaltering.
In his memoir, Boy on a Bicycle (2023), he revealed that he thought Downing Street had completely failed to understand the impact of the changes he was required to implement. Some, like the formal abolition of the lord chancellor, had to be reworked. At the time few hints of his anxiety reached the outside world: he stayed on for an extra year to bed in the changes and finally retired in July 2004.
His ability to make friends across his huge range of interests meant he was in high demand outside Whitehall (though he was called back to try to negotiate reforms to party funding). Among many other roles, he became chairman of the National Theatre (2004-10), a charities consultant to the then Prince of Wales (2004-09) and for the rest of his life he was closely involved with Salisbury Cathedral.
Born in Luton, Hayden was the first child of Gerald and Dorothy Phillips. A year later the family moved to Cambridge. Neither of his parents had been able to stay at school after the age of 13. Hayden rode the wave of the postwar expansion of educational opportunities, although he began as a chorister at Clare College; music was one of his lasting passions. He passed the 11-plus, went to Cambridgeshire high school for boys, then back to Clare as a scholar. He did a master’s degree on a Mellon fellowship at Yale and joined the civil service fast track in 1967.
In 1974 he became deputy private secretary to the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, the beginning of perhaps the most influential professional relationship in his life. It was an exceptionally troubled time in Britain, dominated by IRA terrorism. Despite, or perhaps because of, the pressures, he and Jenkins established a lifelong friendship. When Jenkins became president of the European Commission, Phillips went too, and returned to the Home Office only when he decided staying away longer might damage his prospects.
He went on to run the immigration and nationality department at the Home Office, before progressing through the Cabinet Office to Nigel Lawson’s Treasury, where he worked on Thatcher’s NHS reforms.
Phillips was knighted in 1998 and appointed GCB in 2002.
He married twice, first in 1967 to Ann Watkins, with whom he had two children before the marriage ended in divorce, and then in 1980 to Laura Grenfell; they had three children. From 1997 the family lived on Grenfell’s farm near Salisbury, where Phillips reared pigs and drove tractors. He was a proud and devoted father.
He is survived by Laura and his five children.
• Gerald Hayden Phillips, civil servant, born 9 February 1943; died 10 April 2026
