Book

Just In Time

John Hoskyns

Another recommendation from D.C. “It’s telling how little this book is discussed in Whitehall.”

“I thought that the likelihood of a Thatcher government making a more lasting impact on Britain’s problems than its predecessors was very small. However, in case something different was about to happen, and knowing how unreliable memory can be, I had started, three years earlier, to keep the fullest diary I could find time for. I wanted to capture the atmosphere in Britain, the ‘sick man of Europe, and to record the events that followed: how policy thinking developed, if at all; how key decisions were taken; and, as accurately as possible, the precise words the key players used in important discussions. Once I was working in Number Ten I often had to dictate the daily entries onto tape at night and write them up at the weekend.”
“A diary is the only uninhibited record made in complete ignorance of what is going to happen next. As a businessman, I was surprised to find that no ‘corporate learning process’ existed in Whitehall, except for a rather elementary Pavlovian knee-jerk of dos and don’ts: ‘We tried that in 1967 and look what happened.’ A new government, taking office from opposition, is not allowed to see the cabinet papers of its predecessor. Indeed, cabinet papers cannot be published until more than a quarter of a century later and are in any case somewhat ‘sanitised’ by the secretariat. Without diaries, memories of what really happened fade away.”
“Indeed, to waste the hectic early months in Downing Street assembling such a group would have been a serious error. Governments make their big mistakes at the beginning, when they’re overexcited, and at the end, when they are exhausted. I had no intention of wasting the overexcited phase by becoming an overexcited headhunter, building a little empire we didn’t need.”
“I knew that unless the Government successfully came to grips with a small number of extremely difficult problems that had defeated all its predecessors since the war - monetary policy, union power, public-sector pay, public expenditure and borrowing, the nationalised industries - it would fail, as they had failed. If it succeeded, it would achieve the economic stability which was the absolute precondition for everything else. This emphasis on achieving economic stability seemed to be understood and supported by only a handful of ministers, and was initially regarded by most, including Mrs Thatcher herself, as management mumbo-jumbo.”
“There was not even a common language for the task they had undertaken to enable ministers and their advisers to think and communicate with sufficient rigour and without misunderstandings, instead of muddling along with an armoury of empty phrases.”
“Government was confined to career politicians and their career civil servants, with a small sprinkling of journalists and academics on secondment. These four groups appeared to be the only ones entitled to enter the political playground.”
“One of the great advantages enjoyed by those of us who came from the business world was our relative independence. None of us was looking to Mrs Thatcher for political advancement.”
“No man should be a special adviser to whom the position might remotely appear to be an honour.”
“Politicians are used to being asked the questions, not told the answers.”
“The most valuable benefit of a training at IBM, as with the army, was that one learned how to think properly in order to act effectively.”
“We knew that the politicians hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it, beyond lecturing and blaming management and workers, and eventually taking us into the Common Market in the hope that we would somehow become more like Germany.”
“Though not yet unemployed, I had begun to write a book about the British problem, following the maxim that the best way to study a subject is to write a book about it.”
“Price and I had both attended many hand-wringing lunch and dinner discussions between worried bureaucrats, businessmen, academics and politicians. Such meetings had become commonplace, but they were invariably a waste of time, because they did not start from a shared understanding of the problem. The discussions would therefore range haphazardly over problems, causes, symptoms and possible solutions, getting nowhere.”
“We are where we are because of the things we have done. We must therefore do different things.”
“Then, to my horror and in a fit of madness, it put up several candidates for the second 1974 election and the Campaign for Social Democracy was heard of no more.”
“Like dons, they are always looking for a single idea that will break through a mass of problems - a formula for monetary control, for incomes policy, for managing.”
“Someone would say that what we had to do was such and such. Alfred would cut in, ‘Who is “we”?‘”
“One true enemy is worth a hundred false friends.”
“You can wake a man who’s asleep, but you can’t wake a man who is pretending to be asleep; and, ‘It’s not what a man believes that matters, but what he takes for granted.”
“a BBC interviewer, shocked by Norman’s criticisms of the Civil Service, protested, But with all this criticism, what do you feel about Civil Service morale?’ ‘Still too high, said Norman, who, in a later article for The Times, described Sir Robert Armstrong as ‘the most powerful sleepwalker in Britain’.”
“For we who remain, it is close to midnight.”
“After our ‘hiccup’ at the CPS, I decided that the timing was not yet right for outsiders like Price, Strauss and myself to make any impression on the Tory Party. There was not a sufficient sense of crisis, and I felt that we could easily wear out our welcome if we pushed too hard.”
“Once we are clear on what economic and industrial policies are needed, the key question is: ‘What political innovation is needed to remove the political constraints on government’s freedom to pursue such policies?’ To me, this has been the key question since 1973.”
“We don’t want the Tory Party sailing into office with a cast-iron plan, which turns out to be inappropriate (as in 1970). Better to ensure a sort of intellectual limbering up, a sensible way of thinking, a common language, an agreement about what is going to be central and what is peripheral, so that [cabinet colleagues] don’t quickly lose their bearings when the realities of office bear down on them.”
The stepping stones report here
“Skilfully handled, however, the rising tide of public feeling could transform the unions from Labour’s secret weapon into its major electoral liability, and the fear of union- Tory conflict could be laid to rest.”
“We should not under any circumstances have a large meeting of eight or nine people to agree the paper. That would lead to argument, entrenched positions and Margaret fighting to defend the paper and overriding opposition to it. We should sell the idea to the key people one by one, and then have a meeting of five or six of them on how to proceed.”
“I had a further meeting with Jim Prior, in order to repair any rift, on 20 December. During our conversation, I asked him what actual measures, with Or without legislation, could be taken to try to change trade union behaviour. My note of the meeting says:

“He wasn’t sure. Would check through Robert Carr’s original proposals before the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. I suggested binding contracts, freedom to enter no-strike agreements, postal ballots, contracting in rather than out, etc. There were many, and a short list could be selected. It was truly astonishing that the Tories are still dithering over these questions because no clear position has been thought through after three years!”
“Politicians seem to be more accustomed to being given words to say than thoughts to consider. Speeches are part of their everyday lives. Sustained, hard thinking about policy is often less familiar. When they are given ideas, they mistake them for speeches; and, too often, when they make speeches, they believe them to be a substitute for ideas.”
“I made the point that the fact that the world confuses our plans was no argument for starting out with plans already confused and quoted Slim (‘None of my battles went according to plan’ didn’t mean he dispensed with plans) and Willie supported me - ‘We must have plans!’ But it was an interesting example of the British amateur tradition - ‘Don’t let’s try too hard, for fear of looking foolish if we fail!‘”
“(There seemed to be the same - as with Geoffrey on Thursday - reluctance to prepare meticulously in order to make as sure as possible that you win - and then fight like hell.)”
“Keith was as brave as a lion when facing the real enemy - militant union members or Marxist university students - and being pelted with rotten tomatoes. But he shrank from internal battles and hostility. He found real disagreement or game-playing by his colleagues deeply distasteful and dis-tressing, perhaps because it reminded him how many of them were driven only by ambition and vanity, and how few by an interest in what was happening to the country. But of course, to save the country, it was first necessary to defeat, totally, the defeatists and intriguers in our own camp.”
“Patten was, in all fairness, a product of the increasingly professionalised world of politics. He was thirty-four, and had worked since the age of twenty. two in the Conservative Party or Whitehall. The Conservative Research Department itself had been shaped by the Tories’ post-war acceptance of social democracy and the ‘mixed economy.”
“Inattention to detail, lack of interest in domestic issues, laziness over party policy and a general drift towards social democracy, led by Butler and Harold Macmillan. Soon after the Charter was adopted, Macmillan wrote to Butler congratulating him and saying that its right-wing opponents thought it ‘milk and water socialism, which perhaps it is, but … there does not seem to me much harm in this.”
“I knew from hard experience of strategy meetings in business that unless a lot of work was done by someone (in this case, Norman and me) between meetings, each session would tend to start all over again from square one, and the participants’ reserves of mental energy and patience would be quickly exhausted.”
“had been dismayed by the amount of regulation, the level of employment protection and costs, and the general feeling of order at the expense of dynamism in German business.”
“Mrs Thatcher knew that Adam Ridley, Chris Patten’s deputy at the Conservative Research Department, had always hoped and expected to head the Policy Unit, but she had decided that she wanted me to do it. Being extremely soft-hearted about people, and at that time inexperienced in resolving even such minor conflicts, she was thinking in terms of the most hopeless compromise: that Adam and I should work in tandem as equal heads of what I expected to be a minuscule unit.”

“Worked at home. Voted after lunch and to Central Office at 2.30 p.m. to talk to David Wolfson. New proposal (I had expected a last minute fudge!) is that Adam Ridley should be Economic Director and me as Political Director of the Policy Unit - i.e. a two-headed monster with A.R. actually directing nothing. I said I wouldn’t make an issue of it but felt it was a mistake and a bad omen. If we can’t even take a little thing like this head-on and get it right, we might as well give up.”

From Douglas Hague:

“He would regularly warn people against underestimating the United States compared with Europe. He would remind us that it was precisely the ‘messiness’ of the American economy - much disapproved of by dirigiste academics - that gave it such extraordinary vitality and creativity.”

Failure is less often attributable to insufficiency of means or impatience of labour than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.
“Spads were starting out all over again, with a choice between two very different roles: the awkward one, as an agent of change; or comfortable conformism leading to absorption into the Civil Service ethos, a process by which they would be neutralised.”
“I hoped he wasn’t just being polite, because making our papers ‘interesting’ was, I felt, the key to achieving anything else.”
“A tiny incident but it told me a lot and suddenly made me feel, more completely and irrevocably than ever before, that the Civil Service are the real enemy of hope for the future and they are therefore my enemy.”
“On strike action when considering how to head off impending actions: We also anticipated that the decisive battle would be with the NUM. Douglas Hague had undertaken, on the Policy Unit’s behalf, to pick the brains of officials who had been involved in the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. In mid-September he reported that no Whitehall paper on ‘lessons learned’ seemed to be available, which astonished me. Such a paper must have been prepared, I believe, but it was probably ‘too secret’ to show to anyone, at least until its possible value had decayed to zero.”
On Mrs Thatcher: “Most important of all, I already knew that she was in politics to do something, not to be someone.”
“On many key issues, the Government appeared to be boxed in and thus able to do only those tactical things that all its predecessors had done. Neither the electorate nor any part of the public sector had yet received the sort of shock treatment which, by economic and psychological means, might jolt the patient into recovery.”
“What we really needed to know was the feeling in the steel towns. Astonishingly, there had been no opinion research of this kind by Central Office, or by Whitehall (where it would probably have been ruled out as ‘political’), or even - as far as we were able to ascertain - by British Steel itself. We therefore took the law into our hands and commissioned urgent opinion research in the steel towns themselves, arranged for us by Keith Britto at Central Office.”
“I had walked into an empty room, with one secretary and a cat, with the task of inventing, from a cold start, the smallest possible unit that would be capable of providing the thinking for which ministers would not have the time and officials would not have the political authority.”
“we were attempting to think out a total strategy - delusions of grandeur, maybe - because it was clearly not being done anywhere else in Whitehall. I thought to myself, ‘Geoffrey, if you’d ever been a lonely entrepreneur, you’d know what it is like. What we are doing is necessary. It is possible. But it’s not easy.‘”
“What is wanted is exactly the opposite of what people in such situations feel they need - dynamic action and decision, much of which turns out to be wrong, so that more fire-fighting time is then needed. The greater the emergency, the more important it is to slow down, calm down and THINK. The difficulty in government is the time lags and leads. A major problem - or a wrong decision - will unfold slowly and massively. Like an avalanche, by the time government sees it coming, it’s too late. At the moment when there is still time to think and act, everything may seem to be going well.”
“On 9 May we submitted our paper ‘The Steel Strike - Lessons Learned’ to the Prime Minister, with copies going to Geoffrey, Keith, Jim Prior and Robin Ibbs. We raised many uncomfortable questions that I knew would never surface in official papers, which were always respectful to ministers and protective of Whitehall’s own amour propre. Had the assumptions about BS’s market prospects, pay increases and productivity improvements and the consequent robustness of its cash limits been realistically discussed in Whitehall, or even discussed at all? Why did the 2% pay offer and the steelworkers’ strike decision, coming within days of each other, take the Government by surprise just before Christmas?”
“If we were not able to break out of the public-sector pay cul-de-sac, the brunt of monetary discipline would be borne by the private sector, already heavily taxed and weakened by union power. As with the Plowden regime, we could end up finding that, having tried to make the private sector grow and the public sector shrink, we had achieved the opposite.”
“I always got on well with Christopher, but he sometimes stood on his dignity with me if he felt I was being particularly ‘unhelpful’ (to use Whitehall’s strongest language). Suddenly ‘Dear John’ would become Dear Hoskyns’. I doubt if he was pleased that an unelected businessman with the rank of undersecretary was prepared to write papers in such terms. But it was essential that this extraordinarily difficult exercise in problem-solving, which showed all the tell-tale signs of going disastrously wrong and drifting into familiar Whitehall equivocation, should be sharpened up. If the reader was provoked to anger, he would want to demolish our arguments, and to do that he would have to start thinking. The alternative was to fall back on Whitehall prose at its most tranquillising.”
“However, I felt the need to create some tension in a meeting that might otherwise turn into another exercise in evasion.”
“If we had no numbers by which to measure ‘success’ compared to ‘failure’, then we would drift back towards the familiar comfort words to which all heads could nod in agreement: ‘taking a firm line’, ‘bearing down on wage pressures’, ‘making it quite clear that the Government meant business’ - when all it really meant was speeches.”
“The deeply engrained habit of ‘bowing to events’ was precisely what bothered me about the Treasury approach and the mindset of Whitehall as a whole - the institutionalised shrug of the shoulders.”
“I went through to Number Eleven with Norman and Andrew for the meeting, chaired by Geoffrey Howe, to discuss the self-indexing problem. Once again, there were about fifteen people present, most of them spectators rather than protagonists. This seemed to be something of a pattern in Whitehall. One would have thought that most of the people present had other work they could get on with.”
“In such an atmosphere, it was never likely that the Thatcherite free-market magic would bring about the rapid change in attitudes and performance expected of it. What had, at the time of her election, seemed like an innocent enthusiasm, now seems like a risible delusion.” Guardian article, badly wrong!
“This excellent critique of the draft Green Paper, on which Andrew Duguid had worked so hard, was despatched to Jim Prior on 1 December. The thinking of a single assistant secretary had, in my view, been of more value than the distilled wisdom of a whole Whitehall department.”
“We urged unions to adopt democratic processes by encouraging secret ballots.”
“Jim Prior still argued that even to mention ‘mandatory secret ballots for elections would put all further progress at risk. We said in our note, ‘It would be quite wrong to fail to raise this subject … for fear that even to mention it would provoke them. Democracy can never be a dirty word.‘”
“The Government should give BL a single and substantial cash injection, as a final rights issue, leaving Edwardes and his team a free hand with incentives to align their interests with those of the Government. All this would be done openly and explicitly, deliberately blocking the usual government bolt-hole (huff, puff, and after a year hand over another drip-feed cash instalment, knowing perfectly well that no management could run a big company on that basis, and that the money would therefore all go down the drain, as it always had). If the company recovered and thrived, a miracle would have happened. If it failed despite the unions cooperating, the Government would be seen as giving it a fair chance but not losing its nerve when the end came.

If the unions behaved as irresponsibly as they usually had done, then failure would carry a lesson for other unions. As for the usual protestations about the thousands of jobs which depended on BL, the risk of creating a Midlands industrial wasteland, we believed that the sooner that happened so that the Midlands stopped making motor cars no one wanted and started doing things that had a future, the better. Needless to say, selling a pro-active idea of this kind, whatever its merits, proved impossible. Keith was close to agreement with us by the time I left in 1982, but I think he knew that E Committee would never take the plunge. The Department of Industry followed the usual bureaucratic rule: never stop doing anything familiar and safe; never start doing anything strange and risky. Handing out a few hundred million of taxpayers’ money each year was always the easiest thing to do.”
“She seemed to think that the cumulative consequences of nearly two years of governmental inadequacy could somehow be ‘solved’ at a single meeting. A meeting which identified a problem - the usual point at which problem-solving begins - was to her a failure.

Only a meeting that offered, inside a few hours, an all-in-one, simple, painless and risk-free solution to a problem that had defeated every government of the past twenty years, could be judged a success. I’ve no doubt she learned in later years that problem-solving for a country wasn’t like that.”
On the 81 budget:

“She seemed to think that the cumulative consequences of nearly two years of governmental inadequacy could somehow be ‘solved’ at a single meeting. A meeting which identified a problem - the usual point at which problem-solving begins - was to her a failure. Only a meeting that offered, inside a few hours, an all-in-one, simple, painless and risk-free solution to a problem that had defeated every government of the past twenty years, could be judged a success. I’ve no doubt she learned in later years that problem-solving for a country wasn’t like that.”
“Such elementary negotiating suggestions were extraordinarily hard to insert into the minds of many senior civil servants and ministers. The prevailing Whitehall view always seemed to be that the strikers held all the cards, faced no risks and would therefore always win. Hard negotiation was either impossible or else ungentlemanly. If it were successful, it would be seen as unfair, and would never be forgiven by the unions. In almost every dispute the tired language about the dangers of ‘a legacy of lasting bitterness’ would sooner or later be trotted out by those ministers in whom the will to lose these encounters was highly developed.”
“Pay is not primarily a matter of fairness, but simply a price necessary to ensure recruitment and maintenance of the right staff. It is essentially a market concept. Because the normal market processes cannot operate fully in a large career service, we need some kind of pay system to approximate to the market outcome. Our aim is to find the best approximation - in other words, the most efficient solution, rather than the fairest.”
“At that early stage in her prime ministerial experience, Margaret did not seem to understand that the process of solving big problems started with the asking of questions. Whitehall had never come up with answers before because it had never attempted to formulate the fundamental questions, probably because it did not think that politicians could cope with them. I think she grasped one half of Clausewitz’s dictum but not the other: that war was simple - but not easy.”
“But I was sufficiently stirred by this one to challenge Mark’s own contention that greater political experience was crucially important among advisers in Number Ten. I asked him what this great ‘political experience amounted to and how it was acquired, given the complete mess that had been made by governments full of politically experienced people over so many years. For once, he seemed really at a loss.”
“Ian had checked through the draft with Willie Whitelaw, who had urged us not to do it and not to concentrate on riots but to centre on unemployment. We felt that this could give the impression that we thought that the unemployed were morally entitled to riot. Willie’s conventionally ‘sound’ reaction, which was that unpleasant events or bad news showed the Government in a poor light, and therefore politicians should never draw attention to them and indeed should try to create the impression that they had not happened, was another example of the inability of the political culture to innovate in an emergency.”
“She herself, like most of her colleagues, had almost no executive experience. That was not a criticism, simply an observation on the political world. Few of the colleagues had ever worked in or run a reasonable-sized organisation or been trained by anyone who had. They could read papers, master briefs, speak in public and operate in the House of Commons, but they were less good at getting complicated and difficult things done through other people.”
“Too much time and political capital seemed to be invested in Jacques Delors’ proposals for a single currency and plans for a ‘European social space, which had nothing to do with a single European market. The ‘European project was already turning out to be essentially political but undemocratic, riddled with protectionism, fraud, empty rhetoric, appalling incompetence and political double-talk. In our view it was creating divisions and mistrust in Europe, rather than removing them.”
“radical reform of the welfare state should have been much higher on the agenda. As we had already seen with so many tactical and strategic decisions in the early 1980s - exchange controls, exposure of union funds, the nationalised industries, pay comparability, wages councils, the 1981 Budget, public-sector strikes - there is often a clear-cut choice. On one side there is a radical, relatively simple but politically hair-raising solution which requires the taking of a deep breath and considerable courage; on the other, the time-honoured package of complicated compromises and marginal tinkering (what Alan Clark dismissed as measures’) requiring additional cash and Civil Service manpower, and throwing up new anomalies and distortions, which will demonstrate that ‘something is being done’, but which everyone knows is not going to make any difference. The NHS is a natural candidate for the latter treatment.”
“Britain’s greatest post-war economic problem, to which many other failures can be traced, was its system of organised labour. The results of this system were the symptoms of what by 1979 was known worldwide as the ‘British disease’: industrial disruption on an epic scale, a persistent tendency to wage inflation, chronic backwardness in production and management, low investment, arthritic rigidity in the face of economic change, demarcation disputes raised to an art form, stone-clad resistance to new ideas, managers who did not manage and workers who, it seemed, seldom worked…”
“Of course, few things went according to plan for the first Thatcher administration. But at that point other ingredients, so often missing from government, came into play: the ability, under pressure, to keep the original objectives in mind; a consequent robustness in the face of criticism and unpopularity; the mental stamina and resilience to cope with unexpected difficulties; and the recognition that Britain was at a turning point, which gave Thatcher and her colleagues the determination to keep going. None of this comes as standard equipment for the average career politician.”
“Popular policies today rather than popular results tomorrow.”