Marco Biagi - Scottish government
I once asked a former minister in jest whether The Thick Of It or Yes, Prime Minister was the truer reflection of life in government. Quick as a flash came the response – The Thick Of It, because in Yes, Prime Minister the civil servants knew what they were doing. My own ministerial experience was very different, with top class people working in every team I dealt with. But the joke brings home just how dependent I was on that apparatus, and I can imagine the howling abyss that the job would have been if my teams had been less ruthless efficiency and more Terry Coverley. A minister spends more time with their civil service private secretary than their own family, and every action or decision runs through that person.
Beyond them, you have basically no control over who you have working on your priorities or how their teams are structured. As a government minister you are not a chief executive. The civil service has one of those, the ‘Permanent Secretary’. Nor are any of you the chair of the board. That’s also the Permanent Secretary. It’s hard to find a parallel with any comparable structure anywhere. There is instead a strange relationship where you take high-level decisions that you can be publicly crucified for, and others take a whole swathe of operational decisions – that you can also be publicly crucified for. It’s a wonder our political system has any semblance of working at all.
