Ministry of Defence | Defence News | MOD confirms loss of recruitment data

[Ian Batten]

>
> I sometimes wonder whether it is part of the shoot-first-and think- 
> later
> gung-ho attitude that seems to pervade so much of public  
> administration
> these days.

Speaking as a life-long (so far, but probably not going forward)  
Labour voter, I suspect it's educational standards and intellect at  
work.  You can knock Tories how you like, but the typical Tory front- 
bencher attended one of our better public schools, has a degree in PPE  
or similar from the better colleges of our better Universities, has  
worked in either a consultancy or a commercial law environment, and  
has come to politics in his late thirties having come to realise that  
there is more to life than being fiercely competent and competitive in  
a high-powered career.  Portillo may have been a swine in many ways,  
but he knew what intellectual looked like and could tell the  
difference between truth and bluster.  People like Hurd and Howe and,  
more recently, Lilley and Letwin are the same: to use the management  
cant of today, they know what good looks like.

The Labour Party, however, is full of people with non-degrees from  
second-rate institutions who have never worked outside local  
government and MPs staff offices.  I bring you Stephen Byers as a  
prime example, but there are many others.   Having to choose between  
clever people I disagree with and less clever people I agree with is  
hard.  But when it comes to running a regime, to basic managerialism,  
clever civil servants will find it harder to pull the wool over the  
eyes of Michael Portillo than they will over Stephen Byers.

And that, to quote George Smiley, is my _thesis_: that we get these  
problems because clever civil servants can get around the Labour  
ministers.  And they couldn't the tory ones.

ian