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I was appointed Minister of Housing on Saturday, October 17th, 1964. Now it is only the 22nd but, oh dear, it seems a long, long time. It also seems as though I had transferred myself completely to this new life as a Cabinet Minister. In a way it’s just the same as I had expected and predicted. The room in which I sit is the same in which I saw Nye Bevan for almost the first time when he was Minister of Health, and already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister’s room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great, vast room, cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants. When I am in a good mood they occasionally allow an ordinary human being to come and visit me; but they make sure that I behave right, and that the other person behaves right; and they know how to handle me. Of course, they don’t behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential – ‘Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!’ and combined with this there is a constant preoccupation to ensure that the Minister does what is correct. The Private Secretary’s job is to make sure that when the Minister comes into Whitehall he doesn’t let the side or himself down and behaves in accordance with the requirements of the institution.
It’s also profoundly true that one has only to do absolutely nothing whatsoever in order to be floated forward on the stream. I have forgotten what day it was – indeed, the whole of my life in the last four days has merged into one, curious, single day – when I turned to my Private Secretary, George Moseley, and said, ‘Now, you must teach me how to handle all this correspondence.’ And he sat opposite me with his owlish eyes and said to me, ‘Well, Minister, you see there are three ways of handling it. A letter can either be answered by you personally, in your own handwriting; or we can draft a personal reply for you to sign; or, if the letter is not worth your answering personally, we can draft an official answer.’ ‘What’s an official answer?’ I asked. ‘Well, it says the Minister has received your letter and then the Department replies. Anyway, we’ll draft all three variants,’ said Mr Moseley, ‘and if you just tell us which you want…’ ‘How do I do that?’ I asked. ‘Well, you put all your in-tray into your out-tray,’ he said, ‘and if you put it in without a mark on it then we deal with it and you need never see it again.’ (en) |
