When ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ means anything but

‘My appeal to the Home Secretary is most earnest. I believe that if ever there was a debt due to justice… that debt is one the Home Secretary should now pay.’


That was an impassioned plea by Sir Frank Soskice MP for the reopening of the Timothy Evans case. The home secretary’s reply was that it would serve no useful purpose.

All very unremarkable. Except that the home secretary who rejected the appeal in 1965 was the same Sir Frank Soskice who had made it in 1961. For some reason this was not greeted with the level of public hilarity it deserved, but I remember reflecting that some very strange and potent magic must take place inside Whitehall, some mysterious inverted alchemy that can transmute gold into such base metal. And if you want evidence of how little has changed in 50 years, in 2007 Alan Johnson wrote to the Home Office, making an impassioned ‘life and death’ plea not to send asylum seeker Emmanuel Njoya back to the Cameroon, where he had been tortured. Last year the Home Secretary stated ‘that it would be inappropriate for me to intervene’. Yes, the Home Secretary was Alan Johnson.

Examples of the power of established institutions and the impotence of elected representatives are everywhere. I mention them only because while there has been discussion about what policies a putative Conservative government will pursue, there is a much bigger question that is rarely discussed — never mind what they want to do, what will they be able to do?  

What will a couple of dozen temporary, novice Cabinet ministers, professionals in political communication but amateurs in government, be able to achieve in the face of resistance from half a million or more lifelong professional civil servants and nearly six million public sector employees? Those employees may be there to serve the public, but the first priority of any institution is self-preservation.