The Thing

Alan Ryan

• Whitehall: Tragedy and Farce by Clive Ponting
  Hamish Hamilton, 256 pp, £9.95, March 1986, ISBN 0 241 11835 2
• On the Record. Surveillance, Computers and Privacy: The Inside Story by Duncan Campbell and Steve Connor
  Joseph, 347 pp, £12.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 7181 2575 4

These two books have very different targets. Ponting assaults the entire political and administrative apparatus, retail and in gross, while Campbell and Connor go for the army of snoopers and data-gatherers. What they share is a thought which would have shocked a previous generation of political commentators – the thought that the British Civil Service is absolutely not to be trusted, that the ‘mandarin’ element provides next to no restraint on the politician’s standing inclination to mistake self-interest for the national interest, and that ‘confidentiality’ has become a cloak for a political and administrative unwillingness to answer to the wretched public. The transformation of public attitudes effected by the activities of Mrs Thatcher and Sir Robert Armstrong can be estimated by contrasting the present cynicism about relationships between politicians and civil servants with, say, the absolute confidence of the generation of Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay that ministers would feel no temptation to cheat and that if they had done so their civil servants would have stopped them.