The feud over Priti Patel is about who is responsible: government or bureaucracy?

Rumors of Minister Determined to Reform Failed Ministry Should Be Skeptical

In 1980, while in office for a year, Margaret Thatcher experienced two contrasting events. On May 5, on his orders, the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy at Princes Gate, London, rescuing the hostages and killing their terrorist captors. The next day, she gave a dinner at 10 Downing Street for all the permanent secretaries (that is, the senior officials) of the departments. She was trying to galvanize change with a message from you and I can beat the system.

It was a rotten evening. The mandarins resisted, telling him, in effect, WE ARE the system. Mrs. Thatcher turned to her secretary and whispered, "They're all against me. I can feel it. The contrast between SAS boys capable of doing in black and cant-do men in gray was painful to him.

Interior Minister Priti Patel is Thatcher's biggest admirer in the current cabinet. She will harbor similar feelings today. A foreign woman trying to make serious changes in issues such as post-Brexit immigration and to see through about a third of the legislation before Parliament this year, she faces obstacles from the share of officials. Indeed, her situation is worse than Ms. Thatchers, because she is also facing a character assassination.

Since the day Ms. Patel announced her point-based immigration system three weeks ago, she has been the target of anonymous media reports. She would be a screaming and cursing harasser. Now the Secretary of the Cabinet, Sir Mark Sedwill, has launched an investigation to establish the facts to find out if she has violated the Ministerial Code. The code states that ministers should be professional in their working relationships with the public service and treat all those with whom they come in contact with consideration and respect.

Additional charges were drawn from the other two departments of which Ms. Patel was previously a minister. This is supposed to imply that she has a file as long as your arm. However, it seems that no formal complaint has been made against her. We are in the realm of rumor. We don't even know if there are any facts to establish. The investigation of the secretary to the Cabinet therefore consists in going around the departments looking for complaints, like the police looking for evidence without knowing if a crime has been committed.

It sounds like a bad system: it literally gets in trouble. It is against the interest of good government for a Cabinet Minister to be able, without tangible evidence of serious misconduct, to be put in political limbo while the people supposed to serve the ministers judge their own topic. It's part of the modern mania for compliance. Everything must be codified; everything must be the subject of a formal investigation, which means being taken care of by officials. It gives too much power to the people we, the public, cannot control, and takes away the power from the people we elected. As much as possible, we want the government to continue its work. This is the real public interest.

It is obviously important to behave with courtesy towards public servants. Most of them are conscientious; many are essential. It is a vanity of modern politicians to imagine that they could run the country without massive official support. There is a wide range of expertise, detail and administration that no elected politician, or his representatives, could have the time to master. A current example is preparedness for health emergencies. If we did not have a permanent staff of health officials and experts anticipating such eventualities, hundreds of thousands of people could have coronavirus at present, and it doesn’t 39; there would be no provisions to deal with them and prevent further spread.

But it is also true that public servants must live up to their names. They serve: they do not govern. If you keep this in mind, you should consider the behavior of Sir Philip Rutnam, the permanent secretary of the Home Office until last week, as very strange.