The Daily Express, April 29, Sir Iain Duncan Smith
Long before I entered Government, a former minister gave me some words of advice I’ve never forgotten: “Just remember, deep in your department there will be an official, somewhere, working to destroy you. The irony is that they won’t even know that they are doing it.”
They were warning about the peculiar relationship between civil servants and political masters. Everything that goes on in the department, good or bad, becomes the responsibility of the minister.
I can vividly remember how we had to publish any external report undertaken at the request of the department.
These were almost always commissioned by someone deep in the building, often written by Left-wing academics and packed with criticisms of our key programmes.
Astonishingly, we were then forced to endure a House of Commons punishment beating over a report we hadn’t commissioned, signed-off or known about.
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