17 - Up from the Country: Cabinet Office Impressions 1972–5

Summary

[1997]

I was once a modern Dick Whittington, travelling to London to explore its mysteries – though without a black cat, and not on foot. I was summoned from my provincial Civil Service department to be the Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in the Cabinet Office from 1972 to 1975. My contacts there with the heart of government were intermittent and tenuous; in the cricketing metaphor, I was lucky to get a touch. Yet, like Dick Whittington, I was an impressionable innocent. Recollections of the milieu may be of interest.

Impressions

The Cabinet Office was still relatively young. Sir Burke Trend, the Cabinet Secretary, was only the fourth holder of the post. But the Office was already much more than the War Secretariat which evolved from the pre-1914 Committee of Imperial Defence to provide minutes of War Cabinet and Cabinet meetings from 1917 onwards. Even since the end of the Second World War it had expanded. The JIC had become a Cabinet Office committee when it was transferred from the Chiefs of Staff in 1957 after the Suez fiasco. The Central Statistical Office had subsequently become nominally part of it, and in 1970 Heath's Central Policy Review Staff had been based within its building and administered by it.

Nevertheless, the Cabinet Office's role was relatively clear and unencumbered. Trend's predecessors’ competing responsibilities for the Treasury and as Head of the Civil Service had been eliminated, and the Cabinet Secretary was free to focus on making Cabinet government work. Throughout the Office there was the understated, subfusc but secretly intoxicating sense of being at the centre of power.

The first few weeks brought a kaleidoscope of impressions. One was given a cordial welcome and a folder of useful information, including the history of the building (which I fear I never read). But the institution remained opaque and slightly mysterious, in some ways like the Kremlin. It was a world of common understandings and unspoken agreements. Everything was implicit, nuanced, understated; not exactly secret, but not conveyed by announcements and explanations. I was reminded of my Oxford college just after the war, in which I had lived for five terms before I found that there was a seamstress who would sew on one's buttons. Useful people find out what they need to know; if they do not, they are not useful enough to be worth telling.