William Armstrong and British Policy Making

Kevin Theakston, Philip Connelly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137571595
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica europea

This book offers a detailed account of the life and career of William Armstrong, the most influential civil servant in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the most powerful and significant Whitehall officials in the post-1945 period. He was at the centre of the British government policy-making machine for over 30 years – the very incarnation of the 'permanent government' of the country. He was the indispensable figure at the right hand of successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, and a reforming Head of the Civil Service. His role and power was such that he was controversially dubbed 'deputy prime minister' under Edward Heath. The book also casts light on wider institutional, political and historical issues around the working and reform of the civil service and the government machine, the policy-making process, and the experience in office of Labour and Conservative governments from the 1940s to the 1970s. ;;;;;;;;;;;

© The Author(s) 2018

Kevin Theakston and Philip ConnellyWilliam Armstrong and British Policy MakingUnderstanding Governancehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57159-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kevin Theakston¹ and Philip Connelly²

(1)

Sch of Politics & International Studies, University of Leeds Sch of Politics & International Studies, Leeds, UK

(2)

Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK

Keywords

Civil serviceBiographyLeadership

End Abstract

William Armstrong was the most influential civil servant in Britain in the 1960s and early-1970s, and one of the most powerful and significant Whitehall officials in the post-1945 period as a whole. He was at the centre of the Whitehall policy-making machine for over 30 years—the very incarnation of the ‘permanent government’ of the country. He worked closely with ministers in successive Labour and Conservative governments from the 1940s to the 1970s—ministers who came to rely hugely on his administrative skills and to trust his advice and counsel. He made the machinery of government work and deliver for them. He helped them put their policies and programmes together, deal with the problems thrown at them, and manage crises great and small. ‘One felt that if Armstrong was behind you it couldn’t be so bad’, recalled one of the Chancellors of the Exchequer he worked with.¹ ‘For nearly two decades’, wrote Samuel Brittan when Armstrong died, ‘he had been at the centre of public affairs where his personal impact was a great deal stronger than that of many politicians who fill the headlines.’²

He was regarded with immense respect and even awe inside the Whitehall civil service community, but was genuinely personally unstuffy and informal. He seemed to embody many of the defining features of the classic civil service ‘mandarin’ but was at the same time a very modern figure—rational, analytical, at home with the-then contemporary issues and theories of economic management and policy. His background was, however, far removed from that of the classic ‘mandarin’. As the son of two full-time Salvation Army officers, his early life was spent following his parents in their Army postings around the country and receiving his education in a series of state schools often located in insalubrious parts of town.

He was also the first top civil servant who became known to the public, breaking the mould and consciously cultivating a public profile when appointed to head the Treasury in 1962 and more conspicuously as Head of the Civil Service handling the post-Fulton reform of the civil service after 1968. But controversy surrounded his role in the Heath government and his final years in Whitehall, when he became so closely involved in the formulation and direction of the Conservative government’s prices and incomes policy , and so much the prime minister’s key right-hand man, that he was publicly dubbed the ‘deputy prime minister’. Obituary headlines in 1980 summed up the story: ‘Lord Armstrong, controversial but “a great public servant”’; ‘A passion for rationality’; ‘Lord Armstrong’s life of crisis.’³

Despite the significance of their roles in government policy-making at the hinge of politics and administration, and the leadership they give to the bureaucratic machine, the lives and careers of top civil servants like William Armstrong are less well documented, reported and written about than those of politicians. In part, this reflects the constitutional conventions of civil service anonymity and ministerial responsibility, the blanket of official secrecy, and the reticence of the traditional administrative culture of Whitehall that together have obscured or veiled their activities. Administrative biography has been a relatively neglected and under-explored dimension of historical, political science and public policy studies of government. But a biographical approach has great potential for the study of leadership in public administration and policy-making in government. ‘It seeks to understand how the personality, training and previous experiences that an individual brings to an organization influence his or her performance. It analyses the forces shaping the individual and the individual as a force on administration. It addresses how the individual applies skills and strategies to the role of the executive.’⁴ Biographical studies can illustrate: the different ways in which civil servants contribute to and support policy-making and decision-taking in government; the ways in which leadership can be exercised in Whitehall and the opportunities for and constraints on that leadership; and provides material and a viewpoint from which to analyse and assess change over time in the character, culture and working of the Whitehall system.⁵

There are few in-depth studies of top Whitehall bureaucrats. The books on the major civil service figures of the twentieth century that stand out are the accounts of Maurice Hankey (Secretary to the Cabinet 1916–1938) by Stephen Roskill and John F. Naylor, Eunan O’Halpin’s study of Warren Fisher (Head of the Civil Service 1919–1939), and Richard Chapman’s analysis of the influence of Edward Bridges (Head of the Civil Service 1945–1956) on the ethos and traditions of the civil service.⁶ A recent addition to the genre is Michael Jago’s biography of Robin Butler (Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service 1988–1997), albeit a study hampered by the limited availability of official papers at the time of writing.⁷ The influence of and the controversies around Horace Wilson (a leading figure in Whitehall in the 1920s and 1930s, and permanent secretary of the Treasury and Head of the Civil Service 1939–42) have been approached in short essays by Rodney Lowe and Richard Roberts and (on his role in relation to appeasement) by George Peden, with Adrian Phillips discussing his machinations and manoeuvres during the 1936 abdication crisis.⁸

More collective studies or group biographies have cast light on the history and working of the Cabinet Office and the Secretary to the Cabinet since 1916 (Seldon with Meakin, and Beesley), the changing exercise of leadership in Whitehall in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Theakston), and the variability of the role of the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries (Neilson and Otte).⁹ Also in this vein, Peter Ribbins and Brian Sherratt have been developing a group portrait and analysis of the policy-making roles, styles and influence of successive permanent secretaries at the Department for Education 1976–2012.¹⁰ As Neilson and Otte put it, ‘it is people who make institutions work’—a biographical focus thus providing an essential supplement, alternative or indeed antidote to anonymous ‘institutional history’ and desiccated administrative theories.

In this context, and looking at the topmost levels of the twentieth-century British civil service, the absence of a detailed study of William Armstrong’s career and influence has long been apparent, and this book therefore fills a major gap in the literature. While inevitably foregrounding the role and personality of William Armstrong, and piecing together an account of his thinking and his contributions to policy-making, the book also casts light on wider institutional, political and historical issues around the working and reform of the civil service and the government machine, and the experience in office of Labour and Conservative governments, from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Memoirs written by civil servants can provide something of a counter-balance to the accounts provided by politicians and by their politically-appointed special advisers and media aides. There is a long tradition of memoir-writing by retired diplomats, ambassadors and Foreign Office officials, and of the publication of diaries—some of these volumes being pretty anodyne and bland, while others are more revealing ‘insider’ accounts, adding colour, anecdote and detail, and evidence of the impact of personality, to our understanding of foreign policy-making, diplomacy and international crises.¹¹ There are usually fewer exotic locations and glamorous cocktail parties recorded in the memoirs and autobiographies of officials in the home civil service but nevertheless they afford many keen insights into life in the Whitehall ‘village community’, the issues facing different departments, and changes over time in the organisation and work of the civil service.¹² Particularly valuable and important—indeed, indispensable—for understanding economic policy-making and the relations between officials and ministers in the Treasury at the time when William Armstrong was working there are the diaries of government economic advisers Robert Hall and Alec Cairncross.¹³

William Armstrong himself gave some serious thought after he had left the civil service to writing a book based on his experience in Whitehall. The publishers George Weidenfeld (of Weidenfeld and Nicolson) and Graham C. Greene (of Jonathan Cape) were interested in a possible Armstrong book.¹⁴ Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, would have liked to serialise it in his newspaper and offered research and secretarial help with the project—someone to put together chapter by chapter dossiers of notes and clippings from which Armstrong could write, or a journalist to tape-record interviews and from the transcripts write up drafts which could be reworked and hammered into shape.¹⁵

Armstrong’s initial idea, in discussion with George Weidenfeld in late 1974, was for a book conveying ‘an insider’s view of how British Government really works—not as it is described in the text-books, nor yet as it appears from newspaper stories.’ The ‘requirements of confidentiality’, he was clear, would ‘rule out inside stories of particular events’ but he sketched for Weidenfeld a plan for a book based on ‘a series of letters’ addressed to four imaginary people: a youngster starting on his or her first job in the civil service, a minister entering government for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. William Armstrong: Family Background and Education
• 3. Climbing the Whitehall Ladder
• 4. Head of the Treasury 1962–68
• 5. Head of the Home Civil Service 1968–74
• 6. ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ Under Heath
• 7. The Midland Bank Years
• 8. William Armstrong: An Assessment
• Backmatter