A post which was conceived about the time that the Cummings business erupted at Downing Street in the middle of November, a month or so ago now. Erupted with sufficient fury that he had to make a humiliating public exit with his brown cardboard box. Perhaps they told him to hand in his superman grade pass as he went out through the police checkpoint at the site entrance.
As it happened, about the same time that we watched the episode in ‘Crown’ where the newly hatched queen thought it would be a good idea if she, on the retirement of the long serving private secretary to a succession of monarchs, took on the assistant private secretary, whom she knew and liked, rather than the deputy private secretary whose job it should have been in the normal course of palace bureaucracy. In the end, the palace bureaucracy won and she took the deputy private secretary. Part of the bureaucratic point being that the actions of a constitutional monarch should be a matter of tradition and precedent, not a happy hunting ground for personal preferences and idiosyncrasies. To the point where the person should be more or less invisible, at least as far as non members were concerned. Non members being all those people who were neither members of the royal family nor in service with the royal family. Common or garden subjects. With Edward VIII being held up as the sorry fate of personal preferences and idiosyncrasies.
And more recently, we have been taking another look at the Sofia Coppola film 'Marie Antoinette', last noticed at reference 1, where the incoming foreign consort to a Dauphin of France has to put up with a personal entourage chosen for her by Versailles ritual and precedent. And while she was trained to this sort of thing back home in Austria, she was very young – 14 – and this was the first time she had left home. Not to mention public dressings every morning and public meals every lunch time. And when, some years later, the important job, in what she by then thought of as her entourage, of Dame d'atour – similar to our Mistress of the Robes – came up, she had to defer to the nominee of her grandfather-in-law’s latest and last paramour, Mme. du Barry. This from reference 2.
All of which prompted ponderings about meeting the need of important people for servants.
So suppose we have an important person, perhaps in charge of a country or a large company, with some large companies being bigger than some small countries.
Very roughly speaking, large organisations are organised in a hierarchy, with direction going down into the hierarchy and reports coming back up through it. The present interest is in what happens at the top of the hierarchy. Sometimes the hierarchy comes to a point with a single person, perhaps called the king or dictator for life. Sometimes the hierarchy comes to a council or a committee; a council or committee where there might be a leading person, perhaps called the general secretary, but a leading person whose powers are limited. Most of the time he needs the consent of the committee to do stuff. But in both scenarios we have a leading person.
Now this leading person might be in charge, but he can’t be everywhere, can’t see everything and certainly can’t do everything. There has to be delegation – from which follows a need for traffic between the centre and the delegated parts. Not to mention traffic between the centre and the outside world, be that at home or abroad. And what he actually does do for himself needs to be carefully managed. So there is a need for some kind of a cushion; for diary secretaries, speechwriters, gatekeepers and housekeepers. Perhaps for life guards or body guards. As a result, most important people have what is called in our ministries here in the UK a private office; a small group of people who tend to their minister’s needs and manage his relations with his ministry, with his colleagues in Cabinet and with the rest of the world. A task which has become rather harder with the advent of mobile phones and laptops: it is not so easy to keep one’s minister on his (or her) leash if they have the technology. Never mind access to Twitter.
There is a sort of analogy here with a machine. One might have the separate parts but these parts need to interact and at the points of interaction there have to be bearings to manage down the friction between those parts. Plenty of oil is often a good idea. With a bearing from Liebherr, more usually noticed here for their cranes, illustrated above.
The people staffing up these private offices are mostly career civil servants. They came from regular service and will usually go back to it. They are part of the regular bureaucracy. One upside of this is that they know the system. They are well placed to send stuff out to the ministry and to take stuff in from the ministry. They have security of tenure in the civil service and a falling out with the minister does not put them on short rations. They should be able to tell the truth as they see it, perhaps as it is. To tell the minister stuff he would perhaps rather not hear – something which a servant employed at the minister’s pleasure – or whim – perhaps a favourite gardener from his country estate or a favourite secretary from his town house – would likely not manage.
That said, increasingly over the years, partly the result of the increasing complexity of government, ministers have come to feel stifled in their cocoon of well educated civil servants and started to bring in their own help, people whom they perhaps knew before, people whom they can trust to do their bidding. People who are almost supposed to make waves, to shake the ministry into the sort of action the minister thinks he wants. A process which perhaps culminated with the arrival of people like Mr. Cummings at the heart of government.
Roman emperors did something of the same sort with their freedmen, former slaves who functioned in something of the same way as senior civil servants and special advisors do now. But freedmen were creatures of the emperor in a way that senior civil servants are not the creatures of their ministers. Creatures who were often hated by those born to place and money, the old aristocracy, who thought that telling the emperor what to do was their job. One danger of using such freedmen being their natural tendency to tell their master what he wants to hear. Or worse still, to forget their place and start to tell their master what he should be doing, perhaps having taken bribes from interested parties. I associate to the stories about elderly aristocrats in countries like Russia and France – who came to be entirely managed, entirely dominated by their body servants. If you wanted to get something done on the estate, you had to go through his valet – whom you perhaps resented and loathed in equal parts.
Our medieval kings were some way in between, starting off with their council, made up of the peers of the realm and among whom the king was first, perhaps an uneasy first, among equals. They talked about matters of state. About whether another invasion of France, for example, was a good idea. Or perhaps of Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Or all three. Or about whether the leopard on the royal crest needed more spots. But gradually the kings came to have servants, perhaps drawn from the middle classes or the clergy, rather than from the peerage, to attend to their needs; bodily, spiritual and temporal. The beginning of the modern civil service – but servants employed at pleasure. They were the creatures of the king who could be hired, fired or beheaded as he saw fit. And the unruly peers were increasingly relegated to their estates – or to the extravagances of the court at Versailles.
Our Prime Ministers work to a model which is not so different. They have a council which is called the Cabinet. The Prime Minister rules over his Cabinet as a first among equals. Where all the members of the Cabinet are important people in their own right, with important powers and duties. Ruling over their own fiefs and baronies. They all have their vote in Cabinet. But Prime Ministers also have their own small department, centred at Downing Street, which attends to his needs – although spiritual needs do not figure very large these days – unlike in the US where it is still de rigueur for presidents to parade their prayer books. Which lets them poke around in matters which their colleagues would perhaps prefer that they stayed out of. Lets the Prime Minister get a second opinion.
The point here is that none of this is easy. There is no right way to organise and staff the tops of the pyramids, the tops of the hierarchies. And getting it right has got harder with the increasing complexity of modern living. But I tend to err on the side of tradition, the precedent and caution I started out with. If you have a system which has been in place for many years, have a care if you set about dismantling it – or lots of babies might get lost with the bathwater.
And let’s hope that the places that train the people who staff up the tops of our pyramids do history as well as management. Ancient Rome is both well documented and a long way away from us in both time and place - and in consequence provides a safe vehicle, a safe place for the discussion of the issues here, untainted by the problems and controversies of our own time and place.
PS: I wonder now whether Marie Antoinette was badly homesick, in the way of Eilis Lacey, the heroine of Brooklyn, noticed at reference 3. Something Coppola only touches on in passing.
Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/queen-anne-revision.html.
Reference 2: La Comtesse du Barry et la fin de l’Ancien Régime – Joseph Aulneau – 1937.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/brooklyn.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment