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The wise woman of Whitehall

An audience with the wise woman of Whitehall

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

An interview with Janet Paraskeva

So, to be clear: would Parliament be able to reject a senior appointment, which would represent a fundamental constitutional shift? ‘My understanding is that that hasn’t been ruled out. We do not know yet what we mean by confirmatory hearing. Certainly if there was no power at all for the [parliamentary] committee to throw that back, then it would be almost a nonsense having the hearing in the first place. So without any teeth what is the point of it?’

The Civil Service has been described as ‘constitutional ballast’ or even ‘the Fifth Estate’. But it is an oddity of our unwritten system that it has no formally defined constitutional existence. As Lord Armstrong, the former cabinet secretary, famously put it: ‘The Civil Service has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly elected government of the day.’ That will now change. Does this mean that officials will feel a growing tension between their new, formal accountability to Parliament and their ancestral loyalty to ministers?

‘It presents new challenges but I don’t think it changes the fact that there is only one loyalty, and that is to the government of the day. You can’t run an organisation along a set of views that are in conflict with the objectives that you have been given to run your organisation. I think that would be a total disaster.’

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