Identify with. Everybody in the country can recognize the Prime Minister, while

many cannot put a name to the faces of the other ministers. As a result the PM can

sometimes go ‘over the heads’ of the other ministers and appeal directly to the

public.

Third, all ministers except the PM are kept busy looking after their government

departments. They have little time to think about government policy as a whole.

But the PM does. Moreover, the cabinet office is directly under the PM's control

and works in the same building. As a result, the PM knows more of what is going

on than the other ministers do. Because there is not enough time for the cabinet to

discuss everything, a choice has to be made. And it is the PM who makes that

choice. Matters that are not discussed can, in effect, be decided by the PM. The

convention of collective responsibility then means that the rest of the government

has to go along with whatever the PM has decided.

The civil service

Considering how complex modern states are, there are not really very many people

In a British 'government' (as defined above). Unlike some other countries (the

USA, for example), not even the most senior administrative jobs change hands

when a new government comes to power. The day-to-day running of the

government and the implementation of its policy continue in the hands of the same

people that were there with the previous government - the top rank of the civil

service. Governments come and go, but the civil service remains. It is no accident

that the most senior civil servant in a government department has the title of

'Permanent Secretary'.

Unlike politicians, civil servants, even of the highest rank, are unknown to the

larger public. Very few people could, if you asked them, give you the names of the

present Secretary to the Cabinet (who runs the cabinet office), or the present Head

of the Home Civil Service, or any other Permanent Secretary.

For those who belong to it, the British civil service is a career. Its most senior

positions are usually filled by people who have been working in it for twenty years

or more. These people get a high salary (higher than their ministers), have absolute

job security (unlike their ministers) and stand a good chance of being awarded an

official honour. By comparison, ministers, even those who have been in the same

department for several years, are still new to the job.

For all these reasons, it is often possible for top civil servants to exercise quite a lot

of control over their ministers, and it is sometimes said that it is they, and not their

ministers, who really govern the country. This is a matter of opinion, but there is

evidence that top civil servants do indeed expect to have a degree of influence, if

not control. In early 1994, towards the end of a very long period of government by

the same party (the Conservatives), some top civil servants made an official

complaint that certain government ministers had 'verbally abused' them and treated

them 'with contempt'. It was the first time such a complaint had been made. Then,

when in 1997 the governing party finally changed, things got even worse for the

civil servants. The new ministers, confident after their huge election victory felt

they had been installed in their departments with a mandate to wield a new broom

and sweep all objections to their actions aside. The civil servants found them

arrogant. They even began to organize training courses for their workers on how to

deal with ministerial 'bullies'.

It seems, therefore, that career civil servants may be losing some of their former

influence. In the second half of the twentieth century, ministers began to appoint

experts from outside the civil service to work on various projects, and their own

political advisers to work alongside (or, some would say, in competition with) their

civil servants. The number of such appointments has steadily increased. These

appointees depend for their jobs on their ministers alone, not the civil service

career structure.

However, the British civil service has one powerful weapon with which to defend

itself from these attacks on its power. This is its (largely) deserved reputation for

absolute political impartiality. Many ministers have remarked on the struggle for

power between them and their top civil servants, but very few have ever

complained of political bias. The main hope for top civil servants to retain some

influence on ministers is to continue staying out of 'politics'. This means that they

can be trusted in a way which personal advisers cannot.