If you’re finding the past couple of weeks bewildering, can you imagine what it’s like having – in the words of the celebrated civil service Twitter hero of 2020 – to actually work with these truth-twisters?
Pity, in particular, the tormented ring-wraiths of His Majesty’s Treasury. They will continue to be shackled to their gilded laptops until they come up with a narrative that a rattled prime minister and her brutalised chancellor can use to resolve their trilemma. In other words, to dream up an explanation of their plans that can somehow placate the ravening hyenas of the parliamentary Conservative party, the billionaire non-dom owners of the Daily Mail and the gatekeepers of the global financial markets.
Spare a thought, too, for the rest of us who work in other government departments. Only last week civil servants were, in effect, asked to scrap 5% efficiency savings already agreed in response to the Treasury’s panicky demand that departments scour the back of the sofa in search of billions of pounds worth of new “efficiencies” and growth plans.
In the meantime, are the nation’s civil servants drawing any conclusions about whether Truss will be an even bigger disaster than her predecessor? In a chaotic week during which it also emerged that DWP civil servants, like so many of their clients, are having to switch off their heating and rely on foodbanks to survive the winter, we are drawing conclusions, hard.
Because while Boris Johnson’s personal untrustworthiness undoubtedly brought the reputation of the office of prime minister to new lows, Truss appears to be trying to go one better by trying to destroy all trust in the machinery of government itself. First as farce, then as tragedy.
Consider what she has already put the civil service, the cabinet and her MPs through. First, she allowed Kwasi Kwarteng – on his very first day as chancellor – to defenestrate the widely respected Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar at the very moment when an economic tsunami is crashing over the country. We expect senior civil service “disrupter” and suspected Truss loyalist Antonia Romero to be announced as Scholar’s successor very soon, despite having zero previous Treasury experience. Right-o.
Second, she didn’t bother telling cabinet – let alone parliament – about the plan to scrap the top rate of income tax and is now overseeing an entirely predictable descent into open warfare over the 45p tax U-turn and benefit cuts.
Third, she and Kwarteng ignored warnings that unfunded tax cuts would alarm world markets, and deliberately sidelined independent evidence from the Office for Budget Responsibility. The intention was clear: to press ahead, unencumbered by any forecast that might cast any doubt on their plans, a move that may cost the country up to £65bn.
This isn’t Britannia Unchained. It’s Britannia Unhinged.
It wasn’t always like this. In hallowed antiquity, back before Truss, Kwarteng, Michael Gove and the other high priests of Brexit got their mitts on the levers of power, the Westminster model of government worked quite well for more than a hundred years.
After winning an election, newly minted ministers would hand a well-thumbed copy of their manifesto to a small army of officials, who’d then get stuck into the research, analysis and consultation needed to turn the government’s glittering vision into reality. Civil servants and ministers, assisted by special advisers greasing the wheels between the two, would then work together to thrash out a plan, one whose mere existence wouldn’t terrify world markets.
But the hollow and dangerous new orthodoxy the PM is now ramming through the corridors of Whitehall threatens to shatter our model of government. It tolerates no dissent and cannot be argued or reasoned with, to the extent that a senior government official whose pleas for reason had been rebuffed by No 10 spoke for all civil servants when reportedly saying last week that it was “like dealing with crack addicts” who were “hooked on the economics”.
The reaction of the market has been even more brutal. According to former civil service boss Bob Kerslake, that’s because actions such as the removal of Tom Scholar represent a shift towards wholly new behaviours, causing the wider world to be “less confident that decisions will be made on the basis of robust advice”. Well, quite.
The orthodoxy of Truss’ praetorian guard is therefore not the kindly “broad church” that the Conservative party once self-identified with. It now presents as a malignant death cult. The judgment of the electorate is probably the only thing that will scare the party straight.
The question isn’t whether or not Trussonomics will emerge victorious (it won’t because it can’t), but how much collateral damage will accumulate in the meantime.
Truss’s ideological war cry that disruption is the price of success demonstrates perfectly her naively mistaken view that the orthodoxy she wants to replace is some sort of deep-state “declinist” ideology. It really isn’t – we are nowhere near that organised! It’s simply the accumulated evidence, analysis and wisdom about what works in the real world.
At stake now is the delivery of public services, which will continue to disintegrate – growth or no growth – if ministers continue to fetishise ideological loyalty over objectivity and honesty. Government policies have to work in the real world. Not in Downing Street, Narnia, or wherever it was that Kwasi Kwarteng partied with hedge fund managers in the hours after his mini-budget announcement went ballistic: fund managers who reportedly, behind his back, labelled him their “useful idiot”. This is why almost every government department has a chief scientist and a chief economist. In fact, the whole Civil Service Code revolves around the idea that reality matters.
The brutality and chaos of what is now unfolding at the heart of government is most starkly described by one memorable quote from an unnamed cabinet minister, who said: “It’s like Lord of the Flies.”
Certainly, William Golding’s tale about a post-apocalyptic island under the rule of upper-class yobs who worship a pig’s head on a stick hardly feels like satire now.
The author works for the UK civil service
