Bernard Ingham: How the ministers and mandarins went wrong

I refer to the battle that I had hoped was being fought by the senior civil service to restore some order to our governance after the ravages of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Gordon Brown.

The amazing performances of Liam Fox and Oliver Letwin raise serious questions about whether any restoration process is under way at all.

In my day, the mandarins were wont to take it very personally if a minister was caught in the headlights. “If he goes wrong, it’s our fault,” some of them used to say.

Well, up to a point Lord Copper.

There are limits to what you can do with a member of the Government who is determined to commit political suicide. I speak from experience, having worked closely with Tony Benn for three years after he had relented over sacking me because I was not entirely compliant. Throughout the period he waged guerilla war against No 10 within the Cabinet.

Having said that, we knew Wedgie was trouble with a capital T and therefore did our level best to protect him from himself. He did not have to resign.

Which brings me first to Letwin. After 17 months, the system should know by now that he is immensely arrogant in his intelligence and inclined to do daft things. Indeed, he may now reasonably be described as eccentric for going on early morning walks in St James’s Park, dictating replies to stacks of letters before dumping them unshredded into waste bins.

Such men are dangerous. He clearly needs watching for his own sake. Instead, he found it all too easy to break out regularly before the streets were aired so that Fleet Street’s finest photographers were put on park waste bin watch to the ultimate amazement of the British public. I find it difficult to believe that his civil service private office knew nothing of these aberrations.

Ex-Defence Secretary Fox raises more serious questions about civil service competence.

It seems clear that Fox did not trust the system. There is no reason why he should have done so when he inherited a £35bn hole in the Ministry of Defence’s finances. That level of incompetence cannot simply be put down to the politicians. Civil servants are supposed to be able to count and to keep Britain adequately defended.

It is also evident that Fox, with his own views about foreign affairs, did not trust the Foreign Office. Again there is no reason why he should, given, for example, its chronic Europhilia.

This made him a loose cannon – a weapon which is, perhaps, all the more dangerous inside the MoD. Again I speak from experience. In No 10, we could have done without Mark Thatcher.

It is therefore extraordinary, not to say astounding, that Fox was allowed to bring from opposition into government what in effect was a privately funded parallel but one-man private office affording access to all sorts of capitalists and their lobbyists on the make.

Worse still, their discussions went unrecorded by civil servants, not because they were lazy but because they allowed themselves to be frozen out even of protecting their secretary of state.

I accept that Fox may have behaved like an idiot. But the system is supposed to protect both the nation and the idiot from their potential idiocies. It did not do so. That means that the civil service has questions to answer, too.

And just to pile cream on this incredible cake, David Cameron then employed failed bureaucrats to tell him what had gone wrong.

The plain fact is that the civil service went wrong from the moment Tony Blair entered No 10. Four successive cabinet secretaries failed to ensure orderly governance and to protect all of us as well as Labour from Blair’s informal and unminuted sofa-style administration, the Mandelson/Campbell corruption of the Government’s information services and Brown’s monumental and paranoic incompetence.

The Fox affair underlines that continuing failure.

I am not saying that the civil service is, can or ever should be the alternative government. But it is responsible for making sure Britain is governed properly.

I do not expect grandma or granddad to be able to give a good account of themselves in 50 years’ time now that the Prime Minister’s permanent secretary, Jeremy Heywood, is to succeed Gus O’Donnell as the Cabinet secretary. After all, he was part of the Blair/Brown mess. God save us.