I mostly agree with the mostly positive assessments of Rachel Sylvester (The Times, 10 August 2010), James Forsyth (The Daily Mail, 8 August 2010) and Philip Stephens (The Financial Times, 6 August 2010). But I think they miss the “better government” downside. Not least (I tackle it last, below), there seems to be a frankness deficit.

The good news is that we have a man who looks and sounds like a PM and we have a coalition situation which has revitalised Cabinet government.

The bad is that 1oo days of feverish activity has produced a lot of mistakes, especially as there’s a fair degree of arrogance about. And there is room for serious doubt as to the quality – the structure - of our current government’s policy-making and its commitment to its much-vaunted “quiet effectiveness“.

Here’s a list of things which have gone badly, so far. In ascending importance:

(1) Big moment gaffe

I didn’t admire DC’s populism in dealing with the Moat suicide. Sure, DC was disparaging those who saw Moat as a hero. But a  Christian or  liberal gentleman is still required to see that Moat was sad and mad rather than obviously bad. One can’t withdraw compassion toward him as DC suggested.  

(2) Diplomatic gaffes

I can’t see the point of David Cameron’s picking Turkey as the place in which to diss Israel, or India to diss Pakistan. Doesn’t good diplomacy and good manners (even manliness) require that one says tough things to one’s host rather than one’s host’s enemy? Blaming the Scot Nats (even if it was a long-standing view) for the Al Magrahi debacle was cheap and un-neighbourly.

(3) Initiative Blizzard

Here’s a partial list of proposals which look to have been lobbed at the public to show liveliness: Turning off the children’s database; snatching the kiddies’ milk; binning ASBO’s; dishing the Film Council;  realigning Ambassadors as tradesmen; dishing Labour’s planning system; dissing Qangoes. This looks like the New Labour behaviour we were supposed to be abandoning.

(4)  Bungling big reforms

On schools, University fees, NHS reform, police reform, planning and benefits we have fundamental reform being tackled at (I admit) varying speeds and with (I admit) varying degrees of open-mindedness. None of it looks like process designed to get widespread intelligent buy-in. (The benefits reform is a special case: IDS has a sort of special dispensation, and anyway has coralled special cross-party support for his CSJ initiatives.)

(5) Decentralisation

There is a lot of rhetoric but very mixed evidence of power shifting downwards and outwards from the centre. The centre still bosses people about (hospitals have been told to get rid of mixed wards, for example).  Whitehall will fix how much money pupils get as they choose schools, and GPs get as they buy medical facilities. Local authorities aren’t being given revenue-rasing powers. We have yet to see whether taxpayers will stop blaming central government when their tax gets spent in ways they don’t like, and especially when Post Code Politics kicks in.

Various considerations lob up.

(a) Consultation

All of the new ideas (I think) are subject to a new process, “Structural Reform Plans”, which constitute some sort of road map. Some have been tackled by White Papers which are open to (sometimes very brief) consultation. Some have been subject to consultation papers which will then lead to White Papers. But none of it looks like a consensual process with professional “actors” and government working together.

(b) Politics

It is quite possible that the Government wants to achieve some big stuff and thinks doing it fast and early is the most effective route, allowing “shock and awe” to see it through, and allowing time for the reforms to settle and work before an election. This is a high-risk strategy, but whatever else it is, it isn’t frank, or necessarily steady.

(c) The fiscal squeeze 

The overall ambition of fiscal reform may provide a rationale for getting this stuff done fast, so that the fit between the new, straitened budget and the new, lean state can be clearer.  But these reforms do not necessarily save money; indeed the reverse is often the case. So it’s harder to see the immediate hurry.

(d) The government has not let us see the strategy or tactics in much of its approach to policy, and still less to process. They may think only wonks care, and there’s something in that. But if ministers are aiming at good government, they should be proud to say so and show how their approach to business (the mean not the ends) fit a specifically “better government” agenda. Otherwise, the public, the Archipelago State, and the professions, will feel bused and manipulated. That can’t be clever.

Martin Kettle and Julian Glover are on the money (The Guardian, 19 May 2010). Nick Clegg on constitutional reform awkwardly compensates a new governmental caution with a claim to be transformative.  And Lord Falconer was surely right to tell Eddie Mair (BBC Radio 4, PM, 19 May 2010) that this was reminiscent of one of New Labour’s “big mistakes”: the trust-busting habit of “making huge claims”.

Above all, the deputy PM has oversold his willingness or capability to “hand back power to the people”. That’s just as well: The People don’t want more power. They’re British, for goodness sake: they want the easy dissidence of the well-governed.

On the up-side, the Clegg reforms may make our democracy a little more representative. But this is nearly the opposite of what heart and soul Big Society (and even “New Politics”) people want. Phillip Blond, the Red Tory, was quick to tell the BBC Radio 4 Today programme (20 May 2010) that doing good of this sort fell way short of the new “associative” (mutualist, bottom-up) politics he fancied. When democracy is representative, it is not direct.

Nick Clegg’s reforms don’t bear comparison with the acts of political enfranchisement of the last two centuries.  And anyway, the point of those was to channel and express the fact of the masses’ power through Parliament. The upshot was the deliberate, accountable, meritocratic and controlled elitism of representative democracy. The proposals of Tony Wright’s Commons Select Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons are in that tradition, and Nick Clegg says the coalition aims to enact them. David Cameron may be as keen, th0ugh his attempted scuppering of the backbenchers’ 1922 Committee is ominous.

Here’s the beef. It helps a lot if the coalition government wants or will encourage a revived Westminster and Whitehall. But if they don’t, Parliament can do the work itself.

At this moment, the biggest problem with our representative democracy is not that The People don’t have enough authority over Parliament, it is that Parliament has given away its authority over government. We perhaps ought to reform the electoral system, but doing so won’t much alter this crisis of the constitution. We almost certainly ought not to have a second chamber which is elected, but making that change may not make a big difference either.

Actually, the “New Politics” is quite likely to rebalance things almost by mistake. Sue Cameron in the FT (11 May 2010) quotes senior mandarins (Whitehall officials) endorsing this theory. Andreas Whittam Smith gives it credence (The Independent, 14 May 2010).

The rationale works like this: (as noted by Michael White in the Guardian, 20 May 2010) under Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, power slipped from Westminster and Whitehall to Number 10 (and the broadcast media). Parliament, the Cabinet and the Civil Service all lost power. It is quite possible that a “balanced parliament” will empower MPs because votes will be narrower and because party managers may be inclined to use the coalition as cover for allowing MPs more freedom on some issues. It is likely too that a coalition government will empower the Cabinet since that will be the most obvious way of ensuring that senior people from both parties have dipped their hands in the blood. It is possible, too, that the Civil Service will gain in power as it helps forge the political acceptability and the practical workability of policy. Notice, for instance, how the coalition’s leaders like to be photographed with Gus O’Donnell, the country’s senior civil servant.  (But again, Mr Cameron sends mixed messages: giving economic forecasting to outsiders risks enshrining the idea that the Treasury and government utterance are alike unreformably partisan.)  

Most of what needs doing can be achieved by a bold coalition of Members of Parliament rather than a coalition of their leaders. We ought to remember that the House of Commons has nearly total command, if only its members get out their Blackberries, network properly, and grasp it.

We have over-mighty Prime Ministers and party whips, but haven’t gained strong government in exchange. Those failures are consequences of MPs having forgotten that they have an obligation to ensure that representative democracy works. They need to do that by boldly and sometimes bravely defending a hierarchy of responsibilities. These obligations can be ordered in matching and mirrored pairs: to their country and constituency, and to Parliament and party. These are richly conflicted, but a sense of what is good for Parliament – for the representational part of democracy - will often be a good guide to the other dimensions.

The thinking below draws on the chapters on government in my books, Mr Blair’s Messiah Politics (2006) and Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics (2009).

Institute for Government trawls of the evidence show that the Civil Service is slimmer than it used to be, more trusted and admired by the public than one might suppose, and rather better managed (with reservations as to whether it looks quite so good when viewed from its own middle ranks).

The IfG is doing very important work in describing useful practical changes which need to be developed. My angles of attack are a little different.

Firstly, I think we need to describe to the public how modern Britain is managed, right now. Secondly, we need to make it much clearer the different sorts of job public servants do. Thirdly, we need to consider a role for Civil Servants as custodians of public policy, accountable to Parliament not ministers.  

In turn then:

(1) Mapping the Archipelago State
There is a huge need for a proper description of how modern Britain is managed. I think there is an Archipelago State. Whitehall is its largest island, but the scattered network of agencies, boards, commissions and Quangoes which are the real bulk of the system are vastly important and not readily seen or understood for what they are.

(2) Colouring in the Archipelago State
The Archipelago State grew Tospywise and is muddled. You can’t always tell the bits which advise ministers from the bits which devise policy from the bits which deliver it from the bits which run things from the bits which police bits of society from the bits which deliver public services. Accountability is difficult to discern. So my second call is: colour-code the different bits of the Archipelago State according to the sort of work they do. If that is unclear, make it so.

(3) A new role for the Civil Service
For all sorts of reasons (see below), one part the Civil Service should be the professional and statutory adviser to Parliament on policy matters. That is, the Civil Service should be a publicly-sponsored centre for policy assessment, both in formulation and delivery. This wing of the Service should develop plausible and operable policy scenarios for Parliament and Government to choose amongst and it should provide a public analysis of the state of policy delivery.

The objections to this reform would be that other bits of the Civil Service would be doing this work for ministers but in secret (rightly), and delivering policy for Government, whilst my new bits of the Service would be developing Government policy but in public and possibly in a way which undermines ministers.

The current system, has the Civil Service working (often in public) on the policies favoured by the exisiting Government, whilst my reform would have the Civil Service also, and separately, working on policy for the Opposition (and indeed for the public). 

In short, this reform would blow away the constitutional myth that the Civil Service is the creature of ministers, with no voice of its own.

My answer to that is: tough, and so what? We cannot leave it to a hotchpotch of think tanks, opposition politicians, interest groups and commentators to arm Parliament and the public with policy options.

The public nature of its policy development work would not amount to the Civil service having opinions as to the political or moral desirability of different policies. Its job would be to discuss in private and public  the workability of policies. 

The State should be capable of working up alternative possibilities, and should hire and mandate its own professionals in this work. This wing of the Civil Service would of course operate in the public glare, and that would be hugely energising. It should also be efficient in the sense of allowing Civil Servants to be devote time to understanding policies which opposition parties are likely to need them to introduce.

If you want a picture of the kind of farce the existing system produces, try the IfG document, Transitions: Preparing for changes of Government by Peter Riddell and Catherine Haddon.

A few reasons this reform is needed
Parliamentary and government life is likely to get more complicated if we see hung parliaments and great turnover of administrations between exisiting (and maybe emerging) parties; we are likely to see even more young and inexperienced ministers; we are likely to see quite profound management issues as we move away from the model of the big central state owing and running a vast welfare state aparatus.

Simon Heffer (in the Telegraph) and Anthony Howard (on Radio 4′s Today programme) both today (18 November 2009) poured a deal of scorn (in slightly different ways) on the Queen’s speech. (As in: why is it a good idea to have a nice old lady in a crown reading out horrid Labour’s suicide note, blah blah.)

Very few people bother to defend the old ways. Take how right Tony Blair turned out to be when he thought (one guesses) that abolishing the centuries-old office of Lord Chancellor and the House of Lords as home of the nation’s highest court could be done at a stroke and no-one much would mind.

Charles Moore (and a few old judges) minded, just as he disliked the way the new Speaker of the House of Commons wanted less mummery in the way he dressed. But few others do mind, and most probably more or less approve.

I find this sort of subject tricky. But the issues can have substance, and that is worth pointing out.

(1) The Queen’s speech
The Queen is notionally the head and font of all government, and her presence in the Palace of Westminster amongst her Lords and Commoners reminds us firstly that there are many parties to government and secondly that the nation is different (larger, more permanent) than any particular set of ministers.

(2) The Speaker
The Speaker owes his allegiance (as do we all) to the whole nation and to the state represented by the Crown though he may only do as the House of Commons dictates. He is dressed in a funny way to express his embodying the unchanging dignity of his office (just as a judge is).

(3)
The fact that the Lord Chancellor (ex officio, the most senior judge, and head of the judiciary, and chair of the House of Lords) was a political appointment served the purpose of ensuring that legal matters were at the heart of government deliberations.

(4)
The fact that some of the country’s most senior judges (the Law Lords) occasionally made the House of Lords the most senior court in the land produced the effect that the full might of the state was seen to be at the service of the law.

All of these cases produce fictions, and some might now be thought absurd. It seems that some effects (clothes, wigs, ceremonies) have gone from conferring dignity to evincing guffaws. That’s fair: styles change. It may even be that we can no longer use pretence as a way of bridging rather peculiar understandings – muddles and fudges.

Take the separation of the judiciary from the legislature. On paper, that makes sense and may turn out to work well. But the old way ensured that the tense negotiation between judges and politicians was encompassed pretty well within government. If we feel a need to move on, that’s fine. Nothing stays the same for ever. But let’s at least accept the merits of the old way. Let’s not kid ourselves that we are necessarily going to produce anything marvellous out of our new rationality.

It’s in two parts (after v brief remarks by MBG editor):
(1) Current proposals for the reform of Parliament
(2) Some shakers and movers on the reform of Parliament

MBG editor RDN remarks:
I have elsewhere argued that the House of Commons in principle is supreme and has total command over everything it does. MPs could grab control of Parliament and the Government any time they had the cohesion and courage to do so. The MPs (and the public) need not wait for Government or party initiative on any of this.

There is a rather circular argument that the current MPs have too little moral authority to initiate reforms. On the other hand, if they don’t it will be all the more arguable that they are showing no leadership.

It is great that almost all current proposals want MPs to have more power – discredited as they are supposed to be by a tinpot scandal over small sums of allowance money rather badly-paid legislators were told to pitch for anyway they liked.

(1) Current proposals for the reform of Parliament

MPs to elect Select Committees and chairmen
This is a high-impact low-risk way to increase MPs’ scrutiny of and power over Ministers and ministries

MPs to initiate legislation
It is hard to predict what this would achieve though it would presumably weaken the Government, which has the power of taking the initiative in legislation.

MPs to control parliament’s time-table
This would very much weaken the government’s power to get its way over legislation – which might be seen as weakening or strengthening democratic control and authority.

Fixed term parliaments
At the moment the Prime Minister has the power in effect to dissolve Parliament, provided he can command a majority in the House of Commons. This change would weaken the Prime Minister’s current power over the Government’s supporters and the opposition. There would need to be new rules to determine how to get rid of a very unpopular government before its due term.

MPs to face re-selection
This would weaken the power of the sitting (incumbent) MP but also of the party machinery which currently acts as gatekeeper. The Tories are already experimenting with “primaries”.

MPs face recall by constituents
This would strengthen the power of constituents over their Member of Parliament – and that would weaken the MPs’ ability to speak freely as a representative (rather than as a mandated delegate).

Smaller Parliament
This would make Parliament more manageable but it would increase the size of constituencies and increase the number of constituents each MP is representing (arguably making it harder for each MP to identify with a neighbourhood or take each constituent complaint as seriously).

PM by direct election
This would tend to the “presidential” aspect of the premiership and raise issues of accountability. At the moment, the PM is in the end a creature of Parliament and this approach would weaken that.

Ministers from outside Parliament
This would increase the “gene pool” for the top jobs but reduce Parliamentary control over the executive. It would also reduce the likelihood of MPs becoming ministers which might reduce their subservience to their party and Government managers. It might also reduce the attraction of becoming an MP.

Proportional Representation
In general this produces “fairer” representation, makes forming a government more a matter of party negotiation in private, increases the turnover of governments, weakens the MPs’ connection with a constituency and increases their dependency on a party (though it increases the number of parties in play).

Citizens to trigger referendums or debates in parliament
This would complicate politics, possibly in a good way, though it would increase the likelihood of populist “flair-up” issues taking a disproportionate amount of Parliamentary time.

A new less confrontational chamber for Parliament
Arguably British politics stuck in an unproductive tribal shouting match and the present chamber encourages that. Perhaps a post-class  and post-ideological needs a less confrontational chamber to express and allow an new consensualism to emerge. It might be even more boring to too may people, though.

Elections to the House of Lords
It is hard to see how to avoid making this into a new vehicle for party power, or for show-off independents. It is easy to imagine more imaginative selection processes, free of party power, to find talented, experienced people for the revising chamber.

(2) Some shakers and movers on the reform of Parliament

The time has come for Spectator readers to save the constitution from politicians
Fraser Nelson
Spectator
3 June 2009
(with PoliticsHome)

Discusses:
Voter recall of MPs
MPs reselection by constituents (every 4 years or whatever)
Office for Budget responsibility (being considered by David Cameron)
Annual departmental justification of spending
Larger MP salaries, maybe with no expenses
Whether the existing parliament ought to frame reform
PM to be directly elected
Some/all ministers appointed from outside parliament
Smaller parliament

The real cure for Britain’s political malaise
Philip Stephens
Financial Times
2 June 2009

Discusses:
Gordon Brown considering voting reform
David Cameron wants “Massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power change”
DC “thinks about” fixed term Parliaments
DC considers constituency recall of MPs
Stephens on decentralising: “They would prefer to strangle local democracy than risk their own popularity.”
Local business taxes to increase local democracy

David Cameron leads Alan Johnson in the new battle to be the boldest reformer
James Forsyth
Spectator
30 May 2009

Discusses:
How DC has a very radical reform rhetoric and less solid actual plans
Brown’s John Smith Memorial lecture, 1996: “New Labour wants to give power to the people”
Brown began premiership “proposing changes that will transfer power from the Prime Minister and the executive”
DC to Power Inquiry, May 2006: Power has gone to bureaucrats in Brussuels, judges and
Quangocracts
Cameron’s “speech on Tuesday” proposed “Citizen’s Intitative” and a 5 percent trigger for referendum
Proposed transfer of power “from Brussels to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy.”

This is a constitutional crisis. Dave dare not blow it
Fraser Nelson
Spectator
16 May 2009

Discusses:
Hansard Society say: Only 19 percent say Parliament is working for me
20,000 voters or 0.05 percent of voters hold power, an insider remarks: “It’s the swing voters in swing seats who decide the balance of power. We have computers to work out where they live. We can love bomb them.”

Why we need separation of powers
Andrew Turnbull
(Former cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service)
Financial Times
2 June 2009

Discusses:
“Vernon Bogdanor’s important new book, The New British Constitution”
“More radically, we could follow French practice, which requires any deputy appointed to the government to stand down from the National Assembly. Or we could adopt the German/Swedish model of politically appointed, but non-elected, ministers.

“The Commons does not control which committees are established, who chairs them, who can table legislation and how time is allocated. All this is controlled by the government through the Whips office.”

The Plan by Daniel Hannan and Carswell:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-plan-twelve-months-to-renew-britain/3704883

The Power Inquiry
chaired by Helena Kennedy

(Conservative) Democracy Taskforce, chaired by Ken Clarke
(A summary)
by Hélène Mulholland
The Guardian
14 January 2008

At this writing, 6000 people have looked at the piece on Number 10′s channel. It isn’t by any means the most popular of GB’s outing on YT. Several others have put him up there with Tony Blair’s ratings. He is said to look awful – hopelessly winsome and fulsome. It’s true, he does. But if you look at some other postings, he’s a revelation. Try this one on globalisation. (Here’s the text of it.) He’s funny and sharp and quite clever, just like his fans say he often is in private.

I say “quite clever”: I have looked briefly elsewhere at the evidence as to GB’s intellectuality.

In general, it’s important that politicians should post informal, short material on line. It’s one of the few arenas in which they stand a chance of reaching the young, and do it on their own terms – without the dreaded intermediation of the professional media cynics.

The YT announcement of the MPs’ expenses idea was horribly wrong of course. Let’s list the reasons.

(1) The young audience couldn’t be expected to know how this sort of initiative should not properly come from the PM at No 10. (It isn’t a government matter after all, and this audience were being misled that it might be.)

(2) Hot-foot announcements are the best way to convey the idea that an initiative has not been thought-through, debated, and made consensual. That’s to say: social media are precisely useless for the work GB chose to use them for that day.

(3) The social media are an elephant trap for leaders, from whom – in perception terms – we need dignity above all. YT is never obviously a good vehicle for dignity and is at least a testing one. That’s its downside.

(4) In a classic PR blunder, GB sets off talking uncontroversially and virtuously about how he’d like people to aspire to be MPs the way they aspire to be firemen. And then, having grabbed our attention as a mentor or a senior statesman, he uses the opportunity to play a political game. It’s a cheat.

Still, GB and the rest of us have much more to gain than lose by keeping the PM on YT.

The blogosphere may become a very useful place for governments or parties and the societies they serve. The web is a wonderful place and not necessarily scurrilous and dissident. Barack Obama’s success with social media demonstrates both that the internet is a place where politicians can reach to “the masses” and (less cheerfully) that it is often used for messages which are reduced to simplism.

Just because Gordon Brown’s team completely misread how the web’s informality might play for them, that doesn’t mean that other politicians can’t do well with it. (It’s worth adding that Red Rag would not have worked as intended even if it had successfully launched and been read. I write a bit a bout that at my more personal blog, richarddnorth.com.)

However, political parties ought to be aware that the informality of the web, whilst not necessarily an inevitable problem, can easily be a snare.

The lesson which David Cameron’s team ought to be learning is one that flows from the workings of the New Labour machine from its earliest days. This is that nothing – nothing – can stop the public in the end getting the message about the tone, attitude and style adopted by a party – whether in opposition or government.

It is on open question whether Labour can every recapture its reputation for idealism and public interest. At the moment, of course, it suffers from the public’s belief that Labour is more interested in itself than in the country.

The Tories face three enormous difficulties. One is that they are rightly perceived as a party which believes that its real reason for existence is to govern. That is an unromantic and not obviously idealistic reason for existence. It is not a million miles from Labour’s quite new condition of pragmatism.

Another difficulty is that the Tories are not obviously very superior to New Labour in their mode of operation. Their chief spin doctor is an ex News of the World editor and though he may be talented and public-spirited, it is hardly likely that he is a stranger to the dark arts. What’s more, the Tories seem to be run by a kitchen cabinet of insiders.

But the great difficulty is that at this moment there is very little sign that the Tories are making a concerted effort to demonstrate that they understand this is a field of major concern. Seeming and being straightforward, collegiate, frank and even formal – these are the signs that a party is conducting itself in a way which recognises how corrosive the last few years have been.

This is, by the way, the opposite of trumpeting oneself as “post-bureaucratic”, as David Cameron has been doing, not least in the Spectator.

Since it’s been rather little remarked, I want to draw your attention to a passage in the encounter in which Mr Kermode cheerily remarks that one of the reasons why he liked the film was that (I am recalling his words as best I can), “Anything which exposes the crass venality of politicians is OK with me”. That’s to say, I think, that Mr Kermode will always forgive the failings of an offering which at least makes a meal of politicians.

It was lovely to watch Alistair Campbell rip into his interlocutor. I last heard that sort of irritation when Andrew Marr, usually right-on to a degree, ripped into someone who made a similar remark in the run up to an election (I think it was).

Campbell remarked, more or less, that politicians have their faults but are not usually very silly – and they are not corrupt either. They are mostly pretty public-spirited. What’s more, Campbell went on, it’s the constant drip feed of cynicism from the likes of Kermode which makes young people deaspair oif politicis before they’ve half thought about it.

It was vintage Campbell. And I am almost sure Mark Kermode blushed, though he conceded no ground.

Naturally enough, the House of Lords usually hits the headlines when it goes head-to-head with the House of Commons. That is when its painstaking deliberations on policy manage to become theatrical.

And then, of course, there the occasional scandals. Most recently, some Labour peers have been accused of selling their ability to affect legislation. Perhaps predictably, the fuss induced Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, to retaliate by suggesting that peers convicted of crimes (Lords Archer and Black) should not be allowed to sit in the House.

It is routine to complain that the Lords are dull, unaccountable, undemocratic and lack transparency. Even voices on the right assert this sort of thing (as for instance Mary Riddell in The Daily Telegraph). Critics normally call for an elected, or mostly elected, Lords.

It is important to see that the wrong-doings (real or alleged) of appointed peers (that is, life peers) do not make the case for an elected House of Lords. Far from it. Elections to the House of Lords might well favour rather undistinguished party hacks whilst the right appointment system could easily ensure that probity as well as expertise and wisdom were prerequisites for membership.

Much of this was well-argued by Rachel Sylvester in The Times.

Too typically, Sir Antony Jay trotted out the old nonsense that the Civil Service doesn’t want results, it wants its own comfort. (You can easily listen again to the item, 18/11/08, 08.45 am.) Denis McShane, who, to put it politely, is always as polite as he possibly can be, said that Yes Minister (Jay’s famous show) was documentary and pure fact.

Jay presented his case that the Civil Service exists to subvert democratically elected politicians.

He said ministers have to tell their ministries: “You’re not telling me what to do, I’m telling you what to do”, and they have to ask themselves, “Do you run the department or does the department run you?”

He went on to say that the Civil Service feel ministers come and go and it’s important to house train them. “The Civil Servant habit of thought is, ‘You don’t want ministers to achieve things, you want them to do what you want.’”

At times, he seemed to argue that the parties could be as bad as each other: “A lot of the time minsters and the Civil Service are in collusion, but sometimes in collision.” They he got back to the old mantra: When they did collide, he thought the minister must be right.

Denis McShane made a much more bluntly silly allegation: “The Civil Service represents the eternal interest of the British State and ministers operate, at least in theory, in the interest of the British people.” Perhaps aware that this was barmy stuff, he then said he admired the Civil Servants who had served him and are still there and care about the public interests. Obviously, he can’t have it both ways.

Of course, politicians and Civil Servants have different approaches and even different interests. The Civil Service may well be concerned to preserve the status quo.

What is forgotten, though, is that it is New Labour’s great failing that it wasted much of its tenure in dismantling the reforms which the Tories had introduced to public management. The Government then had to spend a lot of time reinstating those very reforms. To be honest, the Civil Service was rightly sceptical of the merit of New Labour’s behaviour in government, not least as the government subverted very valuable habits of government – such as having serious Cabinet meetings and a fairly coherent approach to policy.