Gladstone must be spinning in his grave
The scandal that has enveloped David Cameron just got a lot deeper
The Cabinet Office, Whitehall
David Cameron has been at the centre of a growing storm over the revelation that he used his position as Britain’s former prime minister to lobby ministers on behalf of a company, Greensill Capital, from which he reportedly stood to make a fortune before it actually went bust. Among other approaches, he (unsuccessfully) lobbied the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, last year to give Greensill access to Covid support loans.
Last month, The Times reported that in 2017 Greensill won a £30 million contract from the Cabinet Office that gave pharmacies the option of being paid early for NHS prescriptions.
We also learnt that Bill Crothers, who spent three years as the government’s chief commercial officer overseeing about £40 billion of taxpayers’ money, took a part-time advisory role on Greensill’s board while still employed as a civil servant and went on to be a director of the company.
Both Cameron and Crothers have maintained they broke no rules. This turns out to be unsettlingly likely. For now we learn, astoundingly, that the rules governing probity in government were themselves bent.
Today’s Times reveals that the Cabinet Office had actually authorised senior civil servants to work as advisers to private companies. Crothers was indeed given permission to work part-time as a director at Greensill while he was still employed in Whitehall. And in correspondence published yesterday, Crothers suggested that other civil servants had worked part-time for companies and described his own dual role as “not uncommon”.
The Times reports:
A senior civil service source said that private sector figures who were willing to work in Whitehall operate in a “sellers’ market”. Crothers has almost 25 years experience in business.
The alternative is they just go,” the source said. “And it can take quite a lot of time to find a replacement. Ministers always say they want people from the private sector with top commercial skills. Well, this is what happens.”
In recent times, the word “institutionalised” has been used in a distorted and misleading way. It seems entirely appropriate, however, to describe this situation as institutionalised corruption of the British government machine by permitting and facilitating potentially egregious conflicts of interests.
Such a degradation of what has long been mythologised as a “Rolls-Royce” administrative class testifies to an erosion of the ideal of public service, and a corresponding collapse of ethics and integrity in favour of a brutal and cynical utilitarianism.
Junking the hitherto essential requirement to separate public service from commercial interests is also perhaps an all-too predictable consequence of the blurring of the boundaries between Whitehall and the private sector. This development, which originated in Margaret Thatcher’s period in Downing Street when she raged against a perceived conspiracy against her reforms by an entrenched civil service culture of decline, now ranges from the massive outsourcing to management consultants of government business to the drive to recruit people with commercial skills from the private sector, on the basis that these are all more clued-up and effective than officials in Whitehall.
It also speaks to a terrible rot in the role of the Cabinet Secretary, the official who keeps the entire government show on the road and is the guardian of Whitehall ethics. Ultimately, though, it is not civil servants but ministers who must be held accountable for the actions of government. And the minister who is ultimately accountable for any such Cabinet Office change in the rules is the prime minister of the day.
It’s currently unclear when these rules were changed. Crothers reportedly took up his part-time advisory role with Greensill in September 2015 while he was a civil servant. He said that the appointment was agreed by the Cabinet Office’s “internal conflicts of interest policy” and supported by “Cabinet Office leadership at the time”.
And who was prime minister in 2015? Why, none other than David Cameron.
One of William Gladstone’s greatest achievements as prime minister in the 19th century was the creation of a clean, uncorrupted and disinterested civil service. Gladstone must now be spinning in his grave.
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