International trade secretary Liam Fox. Image: PA
When I asked Sir John Elvidge, former permanent secretary to the Scottish government, if it wasn’t the duty of a good civil servant to do what Sir Humphrey Appleby so often did and say: “No, Minister”, he looked pained. “No is such an ugly word,” he protested. The audience roared with laughter – and no wonder.
Sir John, Lord Kerslake, former head of the civil service, and I were at the Scottish parliament’s annual Festival of Politics and we were discussing how far the Yes, Minister TV series was true to life. Sir John’s reply was surely living proof that the Machiavellian Sir Humphrey is more than just a fiction.
I couldn’t help recalling a conversation I’d had with Sir Antony Jay, co-author with Jonathan Lynn, of Yes, Minister.
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One of his greatest achievements was to put the civil service on the map for the very first time. As he himself said when Yes, Minister first appeared on screen in 1980, the public had never even heard the term “permanent secretary” – let alone understood what such people did. (Some are still a little hazy. Lord Kerslake revealed that when he applied for a mortgage, giving his job as permanent secretary, the man at the bank remarked that secretarial work was always steady, he had a sister who was a secretary and how good to have a post confirmed as permanent.)
Tony Jay was as amusing in person as in his scripts, yet his insights into government were real. “The job of the civil service,” Tony insisted, “is to say to ministers: ‘Look, if you must do this bloody silly thing, don’t do it in this bloody silly way.’”
There has been a good deal of that going on in Whitehall over Brexit. Take David Davis’s appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Davis, the Brexit secretary, has been rowing back from assurances made by the “Outers” during the referendum campaign that leaving the EU would be straightforward.
"Laying into the punters is rarely a good look for ministers"
Whack through a simple bill repealing all those hated EU rules and regulations? Well, no, it might not be quite that simple – particularly when it comes to the 6,987 European regulations that are “directly applicable” in the UK but aren’t actually part of our law. (Keep up at the back!) Transposing these into English law so we can then repeal them en bloc, or go through them one by one deciding whether or not to repeal them – or to gussy them up to make them more British – would involve the use of so-called Henry VIII clauses. The House of Lords, warned Davis, did not like Henry VIII clauses.
Their lordships might not be the only ones to object. Henry VIII clauses are named after the irascible Tudor autocrat because they allow modern governments to push through new laws pretty much by ministerial diktat with no proper scrutiny in parliament.
Davis also made it clear that MPs would not be able to discuss the forthcoming Brexit negotiations either. Ministers, he explained, would not be airing their negotiating position in public for fear of jeopardising their hand.
At this point you started to suspect that the mandarins had got a grip on the Brexit secretary. After all, there had been no mention of these myriad difficulties during the referendum campaign. Davis’s officials, led by Olly Robbins, will surely have avoided that ugly word “no”, yet they have evidently alerted him to a whole range of complexities on the road ahead – some of which he probably hadn’t dreamed of. Wisely, he has decided to own up to some of the problems and to be fair he is a class act. Whatever his worries about the enormity of the task facing him, he hid any concerns in a cloak of geniality.
Not so his fellow Brexiteer in charge of international trade, Liam Fox. In a move Sir Humphrey would have described as “bold”, Fox attacked British exporters for being fat, lazy and too fond of golf. It makes a change from attacking civil servants (though Dr Fox may get round to that in time), but laying into the punters is rarely a good look for ministers. While Davis exudes confidence – and officials always relish a confident performance – Fox’s complaining tone smacks of desperation. One source described him as “like a wasp in a bottle”.
Just before Tony Jay died he and Jonathan Lynn wrote a final sketch for The Guardian.
Sir Humphrey asks a junior minister what Brexit means and is told that Brexit means Brexit. “Indeed,” replies Sir Humphrey smoothly. “So does Brexit mean keeping the City of London involved in some or all of European banking...does it perhaps include revising our own governance as EU law recedes from our sceptered isle...does it mean the legislation of new health and safety regulations where we have lost competence to Brussels, including the drafting of 30 or 40 new bills for each Queen’s speech for a decade or two ahead?...Can you clarify it for me, minister?”
Fiction? No – just a day in the life of a Brexiteer minister.