Review of How to be a Civil Servant by Martin Stanley - Politico's £10.99

Samuel Brittan believes that the doctrine of confidentiality of advice is the last refuge of obscurantist civil servants.

Amid all the talk of spin doctors, it is useful to have a book on the ethos and working rules of the permanent civil servants who are supposed to form the backbone of British government.

The author is a civil servant who was involved in central policy advisory work. For new officials his work will be a useful guide to rules, procedures and practices that are otherwise buried in many tomes. But the book will also be consulted by journalists, academics, lobbyists and others.

My main irritation is not with this book but with the culture it embodies. When I first started writing about Whitehall what struck me as most difficult to defend was the emphasis on the need for the most iron-clad confidentiality in advice given by officials to ministers. I knew that whatever other concessions were made this would be the rock on which civil service chiefs would choose to make their last stand. I am thus not surprised to find the doctrines about the need to be a political eunuch on which I had been lectured years ago are reproduced word for word. Officials are allowed to provide ministers with facts that might be used in political speeches and to check such speeches for accuracy. They are allowed to comment on the "costings" produced by the opposition of its own or the government's policies. But of course they must not actually engage in the tedious work of drafting ministers' responses to such documents or writing political speeches.

The requirement to be politically impartial and to serve with equal commitment governments of all political persuasions is taken to fantastic extremes. For instance "it is essential that you give no sign that you oppose the principles and underlying thrust of the government's policies, nor must you suggest that you do not respect your minister". That is not all. "You must avoid saying anything that demonstrates that you personally agree or disagree with ministers' decisions." It should never be possible for anyone to criticise ministers for failing to take your advice. "And it is even more important that incoming ministers should be unaware of the extent or otherwise of your personal support for their predecessors' policies."

This central doctrine is in the self-interest of both politicians and civil servants. Politicians are not called to account if they reject official advice for insufficient reason. But officials are not called to account if this advice has been bad.

The traditional justification is that if civil servants disclose advice they will be reluctant to give their honest opinions. It is equally arguable that their work would be improved if it had to withstand public scrutiny. Is it really such a wonderful thing that officials should pretend to have no views? Is it really so admirable that the same officials should throw themselves with equal enthusiasm into schemes for both nationalisation and privatisation? And are not all these fine distinctions between briefing a minister in support of his position and political partisanship pieces of sophistry?

None of this is just a matter of constitutional nicety. Politicians and pundits alike pretend that responsibility for handling the recent energy crisis is entirely a matter for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But is there not supposed to be a civil emergencies contingency unit which meets at official as well as ministerial level? We would be a good deal further forward if we knew whether the officials on that committee were dilatory in appreciating the gathering storm or whether they gave warnings and ministers sat on them.

Going back several years, is it realistic to blame ministers alone for the unsuccessful defence of sterling in the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 and the panic decision to leave? Contingency plans for defending an exchange rate peg are pre-eminently the job of expert officials (including those in the Bank of England); but their role has passed almost entirely unexamined.

The insistence of the higher civil service on its privilege of secrecy has made me much less sympathetic than I might otherwise have been to complaints about the politicisation of Whitehall. Higher civil servants have been justly defined as"permanent politicians". The desire of recent governments to provide a counterweight in the shape of advisers of their own persuasion is thus understandable.

But it is not a sufficient remedy. Political advisers are likely to be even more reluctant than permanent civil servants to disclose their advice. They will lose more caste among their fellows if their advice has been rejected and they will not want to expose the role of partisan opportunism in what they do. Above all, when their patrons are out of office they are likely to be out of a job.

It has been said that power without responsibility has been the privilege of the harlot throughout the ages; and behind all the reasonableness, occasional wry humour and undoubted intelligence, it is still what Civil Service chiefs choose to defend above all else.