Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Robin Butler complains again about the Blair government’s poor, informal decision making! Butler was the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service when Blair came to power, i.e. he was the great panjandrum of government. You might have thought that he would therefore take some responsibility for, lets say, the disastrous privatisation of the country’s rail network that had occurred on his watch. Not at all. He personifies the ‘Don’t blame me mate’ culture of administrative irresponsibility vividly captured by ‘Yes Minister’.
Well, Butler was brought in as a safe pair of hands to investigate the decision taking of the Iraq War. He condemned “sofa government” while, naturally, concluding that no one could be blamed or deserved to be fired. The ridicule heaped on him for such slavishness provoked him into self-important hints that he might have said the Prime Minister should resign if only he had been asked! (He has just repeated more of the same at the Power Inquiry session in Hay-on-Wye, the Guardian reports.) The poor man could not possibly have stepped beyond his brief and taken the initiative for himself. He is not called Butler for nothing. (Cheap, I agree, but in the circumstances irresistible).
Recently he was called in to advise the important first report of the Ken Clarke’s Tory Party Democracy Task Force, (you can get the pdf here), which grappled with the problem of how to end the abuses of sofa government. No one has yet made the point that Butler and his ilk are responsible for it in the first place. Once, he was being interviewed by students of Peter Hennessy who were taken to the oracle to learn about the mysteries of British government. One of them asked him to define the British constitution. His answer was telling, “It is something we make up as we go along”. "We" indeed. Butler’s “we” means “not you”. His “we” was a secretive, self-important cabal who created the informal authoritarianism of the post-war British state. What Blair did was to grab it from them - taking it away from the leather armchairs of their clubs onto his more modern furniture
