We know the score with politicians – it’s the civil service that needs sorting out

As former prime minister David Cameron said, he accepted that “communications with government need to be done through only the most formal of channels”. A letter, he volunteered, might have been more appropriate. But he knows, as surely everyone else knows, that working through “the most formal of channels” and the ability to type or dictate a letter are not why Greensill Capital, or any other company, would want him as an adviser. It’s those phone numbers, those email addresses, that personal access, that ability to navigate the system, that set his price. And so it has long been the case.

I have to admit to slight surprise at the indulgence, nay generosity that has marked so much of the discussion about the Greensill affair, or so it seems to me. Lobbying has become a scourge in London and in Brussels. When I reported from Washington 20 years ago, the lobbying industry – the so-called K Street corridor – seemed to be little short of legalised corruption. But maybe that’s my Protestant upbringing. When former politicians sell their services for access to the government of the day, under whatever constraints of cooling-off periods, registration, regulation or whatever, I am just not shocked any more.

I am not even that shocked that Lex Greensill, founder of the now insolvent Greensill Capital, had a desk for a while at the Cabinet Office and a government business card, though the terms of his employment, the nature of his responsibilities and any remuneration were never published. But private business people advising government has not been news for a while, nor is it necessarily a bad thing (though opaqueness is).

Where I am shocked and frankly scandalised and flabbergasted, is by the separate revelation – that came out only as a byproduct of the rest – to the effect that senior civil servants have been allowed to moonlight for private companies. I use the plural because it would appear – though we shall maybe see a bit more of the truth in the coming days – that this was, if not common practice, then more common than you might expect. For myself, I have to say that just one case is a lot more common than I might expect.

The particular individual in question is now light years away from the scene, of course, but the facts, as they are known, are these: in 2015, Bill Crothers had just left his post as the government’s chief procurement officer, where he was in charge of a £40bn budget. For the next two months, while still a senior civil servant, he also worked part-time as an adviser to Greensill Capital, before leaving to join the company full-time and becoming a director of Greensill a year later.

Crothers himself has insisted that everything was above board – although this seems to have come as a belated surprise to Lord Pickles, who heads the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments that is supposed to review such things. Instead, it has emerged, Crothers’ arrangement had been “agreed by the Cabinet Office under its internal conflicts-of-interest policy” – it thus had the imprimatur of the civil service, then headed by Jeremy Heywood.

Alas, Heywood is no longer around to give his side of the story, having died three years ago at the young age of 56. But it was he who appears to have brought Lex Greensill into government after the two worked at Morgan Stanley together – and a consequence is that Heywood’s posthumous reputation as something akin to the patron saint of civil service values is starting to look a little less pristine than it did.

At which point it is worth underlining a distinction. With Crothers and anyone else in his position, we are not talking – or at least, not only – about the famous “revolving door” that takes senior civil servants into lucrative private-sector jobs when they retire, and especially retired Ministry of Defence officials into arms and defence companies – pernicious though this progression can be. What is going on here is, as someone quipped, what looks very like an “open door”, where a senior civil servant has one foot in the public sector and the other simultaneously in the private sector, being paid at once by the taxpayer and by a commercial concern. OK, in this instance it didn’t last very long. But it happened. How far was it a one-off?

This is where I should trot out the regulation paean to the UK’s inestimable civil service – seen, from London, as being a cut above everyone else’s. Here is a body of men and women known for their hard work, their expertise, their honesty, their integrity, their incorruptibility – and aren’t we jolly lucky to have them, given the “pittance” they are paid.

Well, yes and no. Most people in most walks of British life are honest and loyal to their employer; civil servants are not as exceptional in this as they sometimes think, nor are they particularly badly paid. The rewards for top lawyers and bankers – and university vice-chancellors and “super-heads” – may have sped away in recent decades. But how many civil servants would excel in those sectors? And what price for job security and pensions? Civil servants are almost the last group in the country to enjoy these rarities. Oh yes, and those retirement jobs that give the favoured few the benefits of both worlds?

As for modern, real expertise, as opposed to enlightened generalism, the civil service has long had a free pass, not least during the pandemic (we’ll see what any inquiry has to say). As for accountability, convention has it that ministers take the rap for mistakes; civil servants advise. Remember how Amber Rudd was hung out to dry by her civil servants as home secretary – she resigned; they were transferred. West Coast Main Line, and soon Grenfell Tower – how many civil servants pay with their jobs for mistakes that cost lives and the taxpayer billions? How many civil service heads ever roll?

All of which might just be forgiven if successive governments had not tried to galvanise the sluggish civil service by an injection of the wrong sort of business. So there are performance-related pay and bonuses, but also protected jobs and pensions. And, it now transpires, business people brought in on civil service contracts for particular tasks (fine), and company bosses sitting at Cabinet Office desks (not so fine) – but civil servants moonlighting for the private sector is totally out of court.

Whenever the argument arises about how the civil service and the private sector can best interact, you can bet that the US model will be cited – with its two significant differences to ours. First, many top positions go to political appointees: this is good if you are a UK minister complaining about civil service “obstruction”; it is bad if you want an impartial civil service. Second, and related, the perpetual “revolving door”: this is bad if you want continuity above all; it is good if you want new ideas and live connections with other sectors, such as commerce, academia or whatever.

But the US system only works if you import it wholesale. US civil servants are not well paid; their “revolving door” entails a recognition that government employment is “service”. That is the ethos. The “door” makes it more common than it is here to move between private and public, but that fluidity is accompanied by an acceptance that the pay for professionals in the public sector will mostly not match private sector rewards. Will there ever be that recognition here?

In the US, at any one time, you are in one sector or the other. In government service, practically any outside role, paid or unpaid, must be declared – business interests and income included. Bill Crothers could not have done in Washington what was apparently permitted in Whitehall, where the line between public and private was unconscionably blurred. For all their interaction in the US, the two worlds of work are kept apart. As they always should be – here, as well as there.