How Hitler Reformed Whitehall

Gifted, difficult and sometimes quirky people were needed in 1939. They are needed now.

A number of commentators have drawn comparisons between the dire performance of the UK in the 1970s and its equally dire performance since 2008.

Separately, four of my recent Substack blogs have focussed on the increasingly urgent clamour for Whitehall reform.

It may therefore be helpful to bring the two themes together by re-reading the arguments made in How Hitler Reformed Whitehall by Peter Hennessy and Sir Douglas Hague, published in 1985. Here are some extracts:

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The reform Hitler forced on Whitehall was undone by the peace because we neither tried nor cared to devise its peacetime equivalent. This represents probably the greatest lost opportunity in the history of British public administration. The irregulars, one by one, went back to their universities, their companies, their law practices, their old professions as if they were soldiers receiving a handshake and a demob suit.

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During the war it had been possible to believe that, with the ‘Old Gang’ of appeasers discredited, things would never be the same again. Meritocracy would prevail. Clever scholarship boys, scientists even, would be permanently enfranchised. Churchill himself was affected by the spirit of the times. In August 1941 he told Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador to Washington:

‘…. That it was the secondary schoolboys who had saved this country. “They have”, he said, “the right to rule it.” ‘

The boffins, in the afterglow of the achievements of Bletchley, Malvern and so on, were given in December 1946 what was meant to be a new charter. As one of his last services to government, Maurice Hankey, by this time in retirement and chairman of the Technical Personnel Committee, drafted a White Paper on the Scientific Civil Service.

Just how little lasting effect that document – and the war-shortening performance of British scientists – really had on the mentality of the higher Civil Service can be judged from background briefing notes reflecting the views of ‘various permanent secretaries’ prepared inside the Treasury at the time of the Priestly Royal Commission on Civil Service Pay. Dated November 1, 1954, and headlined ‘points in favour of the Administrator, as contrasted with the ‘specialist’, it reads:

·      Wider view-points: Duty to keep in mind greater variety of considerations. The Specialist’s contribution on policy (if any) is confined to specialist considerations: administrator must take account of these and others too.

·      Greater versatility: must be capable of being switched from one job to another with quite different content.

·      More wear and tear: Takes main impact of Ministerial parliamentary and PAC (Public Accounts Committee) requirements. ‘Cushions’ and ‘carries the can for’ the specialists.

·      Recruitment is much more selective: the average AP (Assistant Principal) entrant is a superior article to the average SO (Scientific Officer) entrant

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The Reconstruction Competitions run by the Civil Service Commission from 1946 to telescope six lost years of recruitment to the administrative class, did not seek a new model civil servant. Northcote and Trevelyan would have approved of the young men and women who passed out of Sir Percival Waterfield’s Civil Service Selection Board, a copy (minus the physical jerks) of the War Office Selection Boards which found the younger segment of the World War II Officer Class.

Bridges’ famous ‘Portrait of a Profession’ lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1950 was a pure nineteenth century performance. It talked of the need of a civil servant to give his Minister ‘the fullest benefit of the storehouse of departmental experience; and to let the waves of the practical philosophy wash against ideas put forward by his Ministerial Master’ and its regret that Whitehall was lacking ‘in those expressions of a corporate life found in a college. We have neither hall nor chapel, neither combination room nor common room.’

Hitler, World War II, and the Central Register might as well not have happened. It was back to business as usual.

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[Concern that the civil service needed] to bear its share  of responsibility for the failures (as well as the success) of government since the Second World War ... became a staple theme [in the 1970s] among an increasing number of external critics of the performance of the Civil Service.

The need for newer of younger blood was frequently coupled with attacks on both the vitality and the competence of Whitehall’s lifers. The most sharply worded critique of all was delivered by Sir John Hoskyns in 1982 within months of his departure from Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. He compared 1980’s Whitehall unfavourably with that of the 1940’s Whitehall:

‘It is a paradox that when government was arguably at its most effective, during the war, it was full of motivated outsiders: while, ever since, we have mistakenly assumed that government can do almost as much in peacetime as in war, but without fresh infusions of outside vigour and talent.’

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But first there is a big difference which we have to acknowledge before attempting to identify the lessons which can be learned.

Munich and the sense of national emergency it created, allowed the Ministry of Labour’s headhunters to suck up talent, like some giant vacuum cleaner, wherever it was concealed in the British Isles. The remotest laboratory, the most obscure department of classics or philosophy were not immune from their attentions. Whitehall’s rates of pay – rarely competitive except with the academic world – were no barrier in the crisis of war time. Duty prevailed. There was, after all, the capacity to direct labour under the Defence of the Realm Act.

None of this applies in peacetime as R.V. Jones recognised when he wrote of postwar Government service that its ‘scientists are largely recruited from those who have fallen out from the academic competition’ and, with equal relevance, of the premium ‘placed in a modern scientific career upon undue concentration at an early age’ which does not equip scientists for life in the word-at-large:

‘This ignorance may even become a habit…. When the energy of the hothouse-forced scientist declines, or when, finding himself outmanouvered in his first few clashes with professional and classically bred administrators, he retires embittered into his laboratory.’

Bearing all such caveats in mind, what could a future prime minister, wishing to freshen up the members of the Civil Service learn from 1939-45?

First and foremost, the lesson is that the most superb human capital resides in Britain albeit scattered in a diaspora of the intellect. Who but for Hitler would have heard of Franks or Penney? There are such people today. They tend not to push themselves forward (Franks and Penney were – are – very retiring men). The compilers of the List of the Good and the Great rarely tap them. When looking for new blood, merit and capability must be the criterion. Political conviction is pretty well irrelevant. Political prejudice is abundant and cheap. With rare exceptions, those whose ambition is to come into departments as ministerial special advisers are not in the same league as the class of 1939-45 or, indeed, of their latter-day equivalents.

The most important motivation for recruiting outsiders today should be to put together teams or task forces to solve problems – not some vague desire to bring in a wider cross section at principal level. Grades and hierarchies should not be allowed to get in the way. They did not in World War II. The great divide between generalists and specialists is as artificial as its malign. Furthermore, new blood must not be allowed to go stale or to go native. Regular transfusions are required not once-and-for-all injections. The best of the career regulars, would, if Lord Penney’s recollections are a guide, gain a new lease of life from contact with truly talented irregulars.

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The key factor is people at the top, both Ministers and civil servants.

A peacetime version of the 1939-45 success story would require a recognition that though the Wehrmacht is not at the Channel ports, the problems facing Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s are so severe that the luxury of failing to use the country’s intellectual capital simply cannot be afforded. It also requires Ministers and senior officials humble enough and brave enough to submit their panaceas and prejudices to gifted, difficult and sometimes quirky people whose greatest virtue is that they are not, in Whitehall’s terms, house-trained. They were needed in 1939. They are needed now.

Notes

The full text (about one-third longer) may be read here.

The historical context may be seen in my detailed analysis and history of civil service reform, and in particular on this web page.

Martin Stanley

Editor - Understanding the Civil Service