Should Whitehall be Treated Like Just Another Workplace?

Years before he founded what would become the modern city of Singapore, a young Stamford Raffles got his start as a scribe for the East India Company. The Company’s head office, where he worked, was a squat late Georgian rectangle – almost a barracks. Inside was a warren of offices with almost no natural light. Raffles spent long hours cooped up in fetid darkness. He copied documents, and then copied those copies. The work was boring; the pay was terrible. For his part, Raffles seems to have been happy to slum it, and carried on this troglodytic existence for 10 years.

But why? Why not join the circus instead? Even to this 14 year-old, the answer was obvious. Politics is more interesting than most things. It is more interesting than waste management. It is more interesting than food. It is more interesting than taxation law, or insurance, or eyeglasses, or shoes. The East India Company ruled over many millions in Asia. It was a government of its own, with its own army – the largest in the world in 1800. For Raffles, it was the tempting prospect of rule over fellow creatures that drove him on.

For a long time this was the implicit bargain of English public life. The country was ruled by a tiny group of people, often of a very young age, who were expected to burn the candle at both ends. The example that everyone knows is Pitt the Younger, who was made prime minister at the age of twenty-four. In order to cope he drank three bottles of fortified wine a day, and he died. The reward for excruciating toil was supreme power over others, and it was reward enough.

The only sensible attitude towards the inquiries into Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, and Steve Barclay is indifference. The essential concession, that Whitehall is a workplace, has already been made. Over the past decade, the British civil service has openly announced itself as a factor in politics. This has, so far, passed off with little fuss, something that is largely due to the TV show Yes Minister, which was always apologia rather than criticism. They themselves have turned Whitehall from an office into an arena of politics. Their relationship with elected politicians is now a constitutional one, not a workplace one.

Everyone who wants to exercise power knows exactly what they are getting into. They want to make decisions that will affect millions, decisions that will be enforced, ultimately, by the threat of violence. They play a high stakes game with other people’s lives. Nothing could be more thrilling, and it is what most people aspire to do. Nothing about this has changed since the days of Raffles and Pitt, except for self-awareness. Until 1945 the centre of British politics was parliament. What was it? It was the place where political power was fought over. It was a place for patrician agon: those who won would be rewarded with sovereign powers, those who did not would slink back onto the backbenches, or into genteel obscurity. It was the place where the law was decided, and it would have ceased to be so by definition if there was ever any professional code of conduct. There was no law above these people; to suggest that one protagonist in this system could ‘bully’ another wouldn’t have made any sense.

You cannot demand the thrills of political power without its dangers, and this is what the civil service is asking for. The elected power is only too happy to give it to them, because it has the same illusions about its own role. Few believe in the cant that members of parliament work for their constituents, or do anything for them at all. We accept that our local area is the vehicle for someone else’s ambitions. Newport East has a member of parliament because Newport East is required to. We dutifully elect someone and let them get on with it, sometimes cordially, mostly sullenly. Any other ruling class in history would’ve been satisfied with this. A real leader, who accepts that they have power over others, only requires obedience from those they rule, not their love. Our sovereign lawmakers now insist we forget the fact that they govern us. They want to invert the relationship, to make themselves into employees and the voters into their bosses. The new sentimental kitsch of “Constituency Work” is part of this effort. It is in this light that we must see Stella Creasey’s long campaign to wring workplace concessions from her employer, something that takes no little chutzpah, given that her employer is the ordinary people of Walthamstow. Ms. Creasey is in Westminster to exercise power over people, and demands that these same people thank and compensate her for it.

It would be wrong to call this venal. Britain’s MPs, civil servants, and judges are perfectly happy to act as the voice of authority, but will recoil in genuine anger and shock when they are treated as such. They demand a boss, a human resources department to intervene when someone bullies them, calls them an ‘Enemy of the People’, or trolls them on Twitter – this is demented, they are the bosses. They are in power, it is by definition impossible to victimize them, and it is delusional and sinister for these people to insist otherwise. Britain’s governing class would make all of Britain into a workplace, a place where authority is hidden by a sham camaraderie. We should not oblige them, and should instead ceaselessly remind them that they constitute power – with all the hatred, contempt, and struggle that goes with it. Those who rule us uphold a particular consensus, and a particular social order: let them defend it if they can.