Declassified UK Op-Ed: Britain’s creeping cronyism

Whitehall and its civil servants have long been regarded as the guardians of probity and the checks and balances in Britain’s unwritten constitution. But they are coming under unprecedented attack from a prime minister and a coterie of his aides in Downing Street making no secret of their disdain for what I have called the “permanent government”, what in the US is called the “deep state”.

It has been more and more reluctant to speak truth to power, failing to warn ministers of the consequences of the disastrous and unlawful invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, or of the ill-judged military intervention in Afghanistan, and, more recently, by ignoring the warnings from internal government discussions and exercises of a potential pandemic.

There is a refusal to commit — policies are always “kept under review”. We are bombarded with statistics — “an unprecedented amount ” is being spent on such-and-such a programme or public service, we are told. Such responses can be meaningless given that the crisis is itself “unprecedented” as ministers themselves keep on insisting.Whitehall has long played word games with the truth.

Sir Patrick Nairne, a former senior MOD official had the honesty to admit: “The secrecy culture of Whitehall is essentially a product of British parliamentary democracy; economy with the truth is the essence of a professional reply to a parliamentary answer”.

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