Ministerial Responsibility: An Obituary

In an entry from last April, I discussed the decline of a consitutional tradition in which ministers were expected to resign for errors made in their departments. Such resignations are no longer considered to be necessary, as has been demonstrated by the ability of many of the current cabinet to weather an endless stream of self-induced crises.

However, the principle has a flip side which has proved more robust. When the Minister for Agriculture resigned in 1954, it was for some dodgy decisions which, at the time at least, appeared to have been made by civil servants without the knowledge of their boss. If this version of events is true, the resignation of Sir Thomas Dugdale was an honourable one from a mythical golden age of politics. Ministers would resign even when the mistake had been made by someone else while the Civil Service were protected from their own incompetence.

The tradition that senior civil servants can never be sacked nor made to resign has by and large continued until this day. Heads of quangos (quangoes?), such as Derek Lewis, and government-appointed spin doctors, like Jo "Bury Bad News" Moore, can be dismissed but, thus far, this fate has yet to befall a top-level mandarian. This made the story this week of the suspension of an official at the Home Office all the more intriguing. Are they about to lose their protected status?

My feelings about this development are mixed. I am a romantic soul at heart and Dugdale falling on his sword has a touching chivalry which appeals to me, and seems to be missing in politics today. However, a persuasive argument the other way is that, whether the government is Labour or Conservative, there's a cock-up at the Home Office every few months or so (it's been just nine months since the last one), and it would not be helpful to keep replacing the Home Secretary if there are structural problems in the department which need to be fixed.

A further consideration is that civil servants have been protected as a ruling elite for far too long. It is ironic that the people who have the responsibility for developing policy on, say, employment, and those who are charged with enforcing any new law in this area (i.e. judges) are among the professions with the most secure tenure, and the least need to rely on any such legislation themselves. Anything which can go some way to give them a dose of reality must surely be a good thing.