Dominic Cummings v Sir Humphrey – who’s right about Whitehall?

We have been here before. Under all governments, politicians tend to become dissatisfied with the processes of government. They are ready to assume that there is a solution: change the machinery. This is now back on the agenda. There are calls for turning No.10 into a Prime Minister’s department, for appointing outside experts as ministers without requiring them to be MPs or peers, for reducing the power of the Treasury and for shaking up the civil service as a whole, all in the interests of joined-up government. The underlying assumption is that if things are going wrong, the civil service is to blame. That is a fair summary of the views expressed by the Commission for Smart Government, in its new report.

In deciding to what extent that is true, we ought to consider two radically different characters, Dominic Cummings and Sir Humphrey Appleby, the senior civil servant from the comedy Yes, Minister. Cummings is a follower of Schumpeter. He was a proponent in creative destruction and warned civil servants that a hard rain was about to fall on them. Sir Humphrey was the man with the umbrella and preferred Freud to Schumpeter. He believed in the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Politics was the pleasure principle, government, the reality one – and he was the superego.

So which of them was right? Obviously, Sir Humphrey.

Creative destruction is crucial for economic health. Without it, innovation and growth would both be stifled. Government can and should have a role in mitigation, easing the social consequences of Schumpeterian change, but not preventing it. There are times when government itself needs a Schumpeterian blast. When it came to trade unions, nationalised industries, neo-Marxist levels of income tax, and national defeatism, Margaret Thatcher was a demiurge of creative destruction and saved the country. But this does not mean that government should be transformed into permanent revolution. We ought to assume, and hope, that in normal times the country will not need to be saved. In such times, as the Duke of Wellington said, and Sir Humphrey would have agreed, the Queen’s Government must be carried on.

Dominic Cummings never understood that. Moreover, he was only half a Schumpeterian. Destruction, yes: where was the creativity? He did not understand that running a government was not the same as running a ginger group or driving a small speed-boat around an enclosed harbour. It is more like taking a super-tanker through a narrow channel which has a rocky coast-line on either side. There are, of course, crises, when urgency and improvisation must prevail, but the aim should always be to solve the crisis and return to normal life. One suspects that Cummings is addicted to crisis. He has been a bull who carries a china shop around with him.

As for Sir Humphrey, the reputation of the civil service has suffered because the public misunderstood him. He has been seen as a Machiavellian conspirator determined to manipulate his nominal master in order to retain power for himself. Not so. Like nature, government abhors a vacuum. If a minister is incompetent, someone has to run the department. When hapless Jim Hacker, the politician in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, could do no more than fiff and faff, it was Sir Humphrey’s duty to take charge.

That brings us to the real problem with the machinery of government today. Half the current cabinet are hapless Hackers and the problem starts at the top. Is Boris Johnson capable of thinking strategically? One does not have to accept all Dominic Cummings’s calumnies to suspect that they are not all untrue. Indeed, the PM is fortunate that Cummings has behaved in, shall we say, an unendearing fashion guaranteed to alienate much of the public. What is the last phrase that the spurned advisor would ever use? “More in sorrow than in anger.” Boris has always enjoyed vastly more than his fair share of luck. Dominic Cummings’s demeanour is the latest ration.

As long as there is a strategy-averse PM and several cabinet ministers whom it would be charitable to describe as second-rate, the recently-canvassed reforms are irrelevant and we may as well fall back on Sir Humphrey. Equally, if there were a strong Prime Minister with a good cabinet, the present machinery could easily be made to work. Good civil servants – and there are plenty of them, especially near the top – enjoy being galvanised by good ministers: see Margaret Thatcher. In theory, she was suspicious of civil servants. Denis would have said that if they were any good, they would be doing a proper job in the real world instead of pushing paper around Whitehall, and she would have concurred. 

But she refused to reconcile the general with the particular. Civil servants? “Pah.” Robert Armstrong, Robin Butler, Charles Powell and plenty of others; “Splendid men. I wish I could find ministers as good as that.”

In one respect, Sir Humphrey was wrong. The pleasure principle and the reality principle do not inhabit different worlds. A well-run government needs both, in a Hegelian synthesis. Politics without sound government becomes aimless, but a successful government also needs good politics, to ensure public support. Even Cromwell understood the need for consent.

So it would be difficult to use extra-parliamentary experts as ministers. Clearly, it is sensible to use such persons for specific tasks as with Kate Bingham on the inoculation programme. She would also make an excellent minister and would have no difficulty in adapting to politics. We have not yet had a husband and wife in the same Cabinet. Perhaps Dame Kate and Jesse Norman could be the first?

Which brings us back to the vital task of cabinet reconstruction. The pandemic is not over. The international situation is complex and dangerous. There are still plenty of Brexit-related issues to resolve. Above all, there is the need to encourage economic growth while keeping inflation under control and stabilising the public finances. That is one of the most difficult tasks any peacetime government has faced. Is this Prime Minister up to it? We shall see. To give himself any chance of success, he will have to clear out the hapless Hackers. Reforming the government machine can wait. The challenge now is to make it work.