The King Who Had to Go Read online

  Fisher did not display the traditional calm, detached, conservative and Olympian characteristics of a top-level civil servant. Instead, he was highly strung and volatile. He took violent likes and dislikes to individuals, which he elevated into a management philosophy under which a competent individual – one of whom he approved – was capable of any task irrespective of technical knowledge or experience. He wrote and spoke in the gushing Edwardian-era style larded with ‘dears’ and ‘loves’, notably addressing Neville Chamberlain, his political boss, as ‘My Dear Neville’.4 He had progressive views for his day; he was an early advocate of promoting women to senior positions and tolerant of divorce in an era when it could and did wreck careers. In 1922, he complained to the Lord Chancellor when the invitation of Sir Basil Blackett, one of the most senior civil servants in the Treasury, to a palace garden party was cancelled merely because Blackett had been in the divorce courts.5 This attitude perhaps reflected Fisher’s own unhappy home life. He separated from his wife acrimoniously and lived the rest of his life as a quasi-bachelor in a circle of like-minded cronies.

  Fisher proved a severe disappointment as a cost-cutter and had probably never believed that it was his job to be one. He was driven by a quite different and far greater set of ambitions for himself, his post and the civil service as a whole. Had they been completely fulfilled he would have been second only to the Prime Minister in power and authority, with the added advantage of job security until retirement at the age of sixty. He saw himself as the undisputed boss of the entire public service, subject only to the Prime Minister’s authority. He was scathing about Cabinet government as a method of producing policy driven by the aims of ministers, whom he castigated as ‘unrelated individuals with no recognition of a corporate trust and concerned each one only to force his own schemes (or megalomania)’. 6 This left civil servants (Fisher manifestly to the fore) ‘restricted to impotent albeit disgusted, observation of this example of how not to run the business of this country’. He fought to strip ministers of any say in which civil servants were in charge of their departments. He also tried to force ministers to clear their spending plans with the Treasury – in effect Fisher himself – before they were presented to Cabinet. He wanted to become established as the Prime Minister’s principal adviser on every topic under the sun and dreamed up a daft constitutional argument that awarded himself this job by right. He fought to bring the Foreign Office under his direct control, but in its established, patrician style it simply ignored him. Fisher’s ambitions went further than Whitehall; he classed the civil service as ‘the Fourth Crown Service’ on a par with the armed forces and awarded himself equivalent status to their chiefs.

  Fisher was driven by a burning desire to do what was best for the country and had no doubt that he was the man to judge what was best. Even in the words of the businessman and later government minister, Lord Woolton, who claimed a close friendship with him and later defended him in an acrimonious parliamentary debate:

  He was a man of profound convictions and little tolerance. To him the greatness of Britain took precedence over all other issues, public or personal. He was ruthless in his dealings with either civil servants or Ministers – including the Prime Minister – if he thought that their actions were not contributing to his conception of Britain’s proper position in the world…7

  Fisher operated entirely by his own rules, completely ignoring codes and conventions as to how civil servants should behave with politicians. He briefed whichever senior ministers he got on well with. If he happened to have a good relationship with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he would fulfil his duties as his civil service adviser; if he did not – as happened with Winston Churchill whom he considered a ‘blight’ – he bypassed him.8 Fisher also meddled directly in politics; he worked resolutely to promote the cause of Neville Chamberlain, whom he considered a far better minister than Baldwin.

  As a regular civil servant Fisher was unaffected by the defenestration of Lloyd George, his political patron, in 1922, which actually opened the way for his next gambits to consolidate his power in Whitehall. He tried to bring under his control the one crucial piece of the machinery, the Cabinet Secretariat, which operated autonomously as the personal fiefdom of the first Cabinet Secretary Sir Maurice Hankey, who had also acted as Lloyd George’s personal adviser, much as Fisher dreamed of being adviser to all Prime Ministers. Hankey had a very high personal reputation for competence and integrity so Fisher’s move failed but he used the next change of government to begin using the title ‘Head of the Civil Service’ as his official designation and not merely as an informal adjunct to his job at the Treasury. Under this new banner, he renewed his assault on Hankey’s standing by boosting his own position on the Committee of Imperial Defence, Britain’s top military planning body, which Hankey cherished as his original springboard to power in Whitehall.

  Predictably, Fisher’s high-handedness made him enemies and, in 1926, he became the target of a parliamentary campaign triggered by his assault on Hankey. It was vigorously supported by George V, who held Hankey in high regard and was outraged at Fisher’s pretensions, notably at Fisher calling himself ‘Head of the Civil Service’. Not only had royal approval never been sought for the new title, but it referred to the ‘Civil Service’ rather than ‘His Majesty’s Civil Service’ as though it were Fisher’s own personal enterprise. The weaknesses in the government case were mercilessly skewered in some remarkably sarcastic letters from the palace to which Downing Street struggled to respond adequately.9 Baldwin had an easier job of defending Fisher in the ensuing House of Commons debate against an astonishingly inept attack by some very third-rate debaters, but this marked the end of Fisher’s drive to expand his own powers. Thereafter he behaved more circumspectly and devoted himself to lesser goals, notably to reforming the Prime Minister’s personal staff arrangements. In part this was a piece of badly needed modernisation but also, predictably, a land-grab on behalf of the regular civil service and by extension Fisher himself.

  Before the Second World War the Prime Minister was supported by a staff little bigger than that available to a provincial bishop. It was ludicrously inadequate to handle the volume of work of a twentieth-century head of government. By custom the Prime Minister had three private secretaries, only one of whom was a professional civil servant, and a fairly junior one at that. No qualifications or experience were required of the others; the Prime Minister simply chose them on whatever grounds happened to appeal, usually family or personal acquaintance. Fisher set out to transform the Prime Minister’s personal staff from a pool of amateur patronage into the exclusive preserve of professional civil servants, answerable of course to himself. Fisher’s first step was to eliminate the most objectionable survivor of the old regime, Colonel Sir Ronald Waterhouse. Waterhouse was devious, duplicitous and an obvious relic of how things were done in the Lloyd George era. Fisher tried to buy him off with the offer of a directorship of the Suez Canal Company, one of the juiciest near sinecures available. This failed, but eventually an unsuitable marriage saw him off; Baldwin’s wife Lucy was extremely strait-laced on such matters. Fisher’s next step was to upgrade the Prime Minister’s staff simply by installing more senior and more dynamic civil servants as private secretaries, but here he was less successful. Fisher’s first pick was Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office, but he had no opportunity to establish himself in the post properly. His appointment lasted only two years, serving two different Prime Ministers – it was brought to a premature end when Fisher had the opportunity to parachute him into the top position at the Foreign Office. Moreover, Vansittart was a prime example of Fisher’s often suspect judgement of individuals; he rivalled Fisher for high-handedness, but was devoid of his low cunning. Fisher’s second pick as a heavyweight private secretary to the Prime Minister, James Barlow, was a far better administrator, who went on to reach the top of the Treasury, but his appointment began in near farce.10 The then Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was morbidly suspicious of
the civil service as a whole, and frantic efforts had to be made to conceal from him the fact that Barlow was Fisher’s own nominee. MacDonald and Barlow did not get on well personally and Barlow was happy to move back to the Treasury after barely a year.

  It was not until in 1935, when MacDonald stepped down as Prime Minister and Baldwin returned to 10 Downing Street, that Fisher was able to take a radical step towards creating a perfect civil service cocoon around the Prime Minister. The signs were propitious. At the age of sixty-seven, Baldwin was tired and knew it. As deputy Prime Minister in MacDonald’s coalition government and leader of the dominant Conservative Party he had borne much of the political burden since 1931. Stepping up to the official top job meant an enormous increase in his workload. The Prime Minister bore a massive administrative burden and Baldwin had neither the skills nor the taste to bear it alone. Baldwin’s heart lay in the House of Commons and not in the meeting rooms of Whitehall. Fisher came up with a remarkably simple solution. A top-level civil servant whom Baldwin already knew and trusted would be attached to the staff at 10 Downing Street: ‘[e]xperience had shown … the need of an experienced official at No. 10 on the P.M.’s Staff who knew the machine of government. The burden on the P.M. was such that he needed this help more and more.’11 He would have no official job title, defined remit or set term of office. He would just help the Prime Minister however he could and however the Prime Minister thought he could. The man who was chosen – according to one account, specifically asked for by Baldwin – was Sir Horace Wilson.

  Senior civil servants hold mixed opinions of the ministers they serve, but are usually exceptionally discreet in how these are expressed. Fisher, however, was openly contemptuous of politicians individually and in general. Baldwin was a particular target of his criticism for what he saw as idleness and moral cowardice: ‘S.B.’s tendency whenever he saw a job of work or some responsibility was to bolt … I must admit he does it with remarkable skill.’12 Like many, Fisher failed to recognise that delaying action or decision was central to Baldwin’s political methods. Doubtless Fisher hoped that Wilson would hold Baldwin’s nose to the grindstone.

  Wilson was an example of how the civil service was a pioneer in terms of social mobility. He had been born in the unfashionable seaside resort of Bournemouth to parents at the higher end of the working class: a cabinet maker and a boarding-house keeper. He had entered the civil service at its most junior grade, boy clerk, after only basic schooling. He had enough ambition, brain and commitment to earn a university degree at night school whilst he was already working. Unlike Fisher, he had the calm, detached style of the traditional senior civil servant, but this had been honed in a far rougher environment. He had developed great skill as an industrial negotiator and conciliator in the poisonous and often violent world of labour relations before the First World War. He had proven his worth to Baldwin during the General Strike, when he had been one of the inner circle around the Prime Minister as the chief civil servant of the Ministry of Labour. Wilson had generally supported a hard line, and it was he who had imposed the final humiliation on the strike leaders by insisting that they conceded defeat to him personally before they were even allowed to surrender formally to the Prime Minister.13 It is improbable that this was his own initiative and, perhaps, a lesson to him, that civil servants sometimes have to do the politicians’ dirty work for them. His career had taken a wrong turning in 1929, when he became the civil service front man of a futile political initiative to tackle the growing catastrophe of unemployment. It soon collapsed but Wilson was far too able a civil servant to lose. The grand-sounding but entirely unspecific job of ‘Chief Industrial Adviser’ was devised to keep him on the civil service payroll, but this accidentally created huge confusion amongst historians as to what he actually did. It was the only official title he held for the next nine years, and it more or less accurately described his work for the first five of them when he was the civil service’s chief odd-job man for economic affairs, but it was quite unrelated to the work he did at Downing Street.

  Wilson was a far more restful individual than Fisher. He had a gentle if faintly acerbic sense of humour and an understated charm that won him long-lasting friends amongst the men he dealt with at all levels of government and business. He had an entirely stable and contented home life and was an enthusiastic evangelical Christian. He had none of the abrasiveness that made so many enemies for Fisher, but he had one great flaw: he had unshakable confidence in the correctness of his judgement, and barely ever admitted error.14 His memoranda are calm, measured and models of clarity, but they almost invariably either assume unarguable premises or arrive at unqualified conclusions.

  Wilson was immediately aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of his new position at Downing Street and discussed them frankly with an old friend, Raymond Streat, on a peaceful summer stroll through the Sussex lanes near his weekend cottage. In contrast to Fisher’s self-interested constitutional theorising, he concentrated on the nitty-gritty of how jobs work and how small motives can be as important as large ones. He knew there was no guarantee that his job would continue when Baldwin’s premiership ended, which most observers expected would only be in a very few years. He feared that he might be resented by both ministers and his civil service colleagues, suspicious that something approaching the French chef de cabinet (chief of staff ) system would diminish their power. He also foresaw that part of his job would be to act as a buffer between the Prime Minister and other members of the government, and that a time would come when it would come down to a question of raw power: ‘What will happen … when I have to say “No” to some minister who wants a “Yes” from S.B., I do not know.’15 He believed he could spare the Prime Minister much work because of how well he thought he knew Baldwin’s mind. Worryingly, he thought that this mind-reading skill alone was sufficient; he did not ask himself at what point he would need to refer questions to the Prime Minister. This was the seed of a more dangerous arrogance than Fisher’s.

  It was up to Wilson to make what he could of the job. He stood higher in the civil service hierarchy than anyone else who had been based at 10 Downing Street, but his standing was ambiguous. He had ceased being a head of department – and a junior one at that – years before, and since then had been almost in limbo. The informal status of his new job might have been due to the fact that Fisher recognised a risk that the new man in Downing Street would hold potentially phenomenal power and that this would be reinforced if he was given a clear official title and rank. If this was so, Fisher was being prescient; within a couple of years Wilson would eclipse him entirely, but for the time his job bore all the signs of a temporary posting. According to the civil service list, he was merely ‘attached for service at 10 Downing Street’. He was clearly junior to Fisher and was not going to achieve anything without his support, but together they had the potential to be a formidable partnership: proximity to the Prime Minister allied to domination of the entire civil service machine. For the first two or three years the partnership did work very well.

  Whilst Wilson had neither job title nor detailed remit, he was given one priceless advantage in the mechanics of bureaucratic power: a small office immediately next to the Cabinet Room overlooking Horse Guards Parade. As one later Downing Street insider has written:

  It was seen as the key room because of its access … The point was its location with access to all ministers coming to wait in the lobby outside the cabinet room and knowing when cabinet meetings were ending and Prime Minister free. Access equals power.16

  Later occupants included such virtuosi of translating access to the Prime Minister into power and influence far beyond that of their official jobs such as Brendan Bracken and Marcia Williams. A muted but sustained struggle amongst the members of the entourage of incoming Prime Ministers to be the one to occupy the room has been a regular feature of changes of government. Baldwin preferred to work in the intimacy of his library upstairs at No. 10, which somewhat diluted the tactical value of Wilso
n’s office, but it was a formidable location nonetheless. The contrast between their offices was emblematic of the differences in the way he and Fisher held the levers of power. Wilson operated quietly in the background, ever alert to the realities of power. Even when he had become far better known, he was classed first and foremost as an éminence grise. Fisher operated from the splendour of the Permanent Secretary’s office in Treasury Chambers and cheerfully talked down to even the highest in the land.

  Wilson’s first half year at Downing Street was quiet. The Prime Minister’s attention was dominated by diplomacy and party politics, matters in which the home civil service was little involved. Immediately after Baldwin arrived in Downing Street he had to prepare for the general election later in the year that the national government won comfortably. More menacingly, the invasion of Abyssinia opened the series of diplomatic crises that culminated in the Second World War. This did not stop Wilson making his presence felt in Downing Street. Compared to his political counterpart as the Prime Minister’s odd-job man, he seemed to embody a shift in power from politicians to the civil service. Eustace Percy had been appointed as Minister without Portfolio by Baldwin, who had a largely inexplicable soft spot for him. He had a seat in Cabinet but no very clear remit and, crucially, no access to civil service support. Non-departmental ministers are often entrusted with important one-off tasks, but this depends on the tasks and competition from elsewhere in the machine of government to undertake them. After a few frustrating and miserable months in office he resigned in April 1936. According to a seasoned Whitehall insider, ‘Probably the existence of Horace Wilson on the P.M.’s staff made Percy all the more superfluous.’17 Wilson’s arrival in Downing Street also marked the beginning of the final eclipse from power of Hankey, who found himself cut out of the new order.