7 Running on Empty

In his war memoirs General de Gaulle rated the Whitehall engine ‘the finest … in the world’. ‘To resist the British machine’, he wrote, ‘when it set itself in motion to impose something was a severe test.

The geopolitical revolution presented the biggest headache: how to recover a world role with greatly diminished resources in a predatory, swiftly changing environment? The pain and bewilderment of policy-makers as they struggled to make sense of the post-war world is almost palpable. ‘The problems in front of us’, warned a top diplomat, ‘are manifold and awful’. ‘In the worst of the war I could always see how to do it’, confided Churchill; ‘today’s problems are elusive and intangible’. The war brought a sea change in international affairs. The second conflict was much more destructive for the European powers than the first. The American–Soviet monopoly of high politics disempowered Europe.

Bilateral diplomacy conducted by representatives in the field was the pre-1939 norm. Apart from occasional jaunts to the League of Nations at Geneva, ministers stayed at home. The urgency of recovery enforced cooperation at all levels. The Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 introduced global institutions – UN, IMF and GATT. By the late 1940s ministers formed a flying circus. Eighteen-hour transatlantic flights in ear-splitting piston-engined aircraft left everyone worse for wear. When a budget-conscious minister booked commercial flights for short-haul European trips, fellow passengers tried to read paperwork over his shoulder. Getting there was only half the battle. Hotels might be uncomfortable in more ways than one. At the Geneva Conference on Vietnam in 1954 foreign secretary Eden was ‘unable to sleep owing to the traffic outside his window’ and unable to speak ‘without being overheard by Chinks’. Frequent travel multiplied the potential for gaffes. ‘Peking, Alec, Peking, Peking’, whispered the wife of foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home as she followed her husband out of the plane. The hours lost to overseas visits slowed down No. 10: ‘jobs were continually frustrated, particularly when it was impossible to get more direct advice and instructions from the Prime Minister.’3

Multilateralism spewed out an ‘alarming growth of international committees and commissions of every sort and kind’, prolonging negotiating times, and making it harder to keep overall objectives in sight. Meetings, paperwork and travel expanded. Worst of all, decision-makers had to adjust to a complex institutional web ‘in which the same issues were discussed by the same people on different occasions and in different places’.

Two other aspects of the revolution in world politics stymied decision-making: the terrifying speed and simultaneity of change; the fusing of foreign and domestic issues. Fresh eruptions remade the landscape: Cold War, Korean War, Afro–Asian nationalism, Communist victory in China, wars of decolonization. ‘All the world is in trouble’, said Bevin, ‘and I have to deal with all the troubles at once’. Soviet representatives set up road blocks. At the 1946 Paris peace conference Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet commissar for foreign affairs – ‘Mr. Nyet’ – stonewalled American secretary of state James Byrnes and British foreign secretary Bevin. Overlapping issues grew like Topsy. ‘At every Cabinet today’, noted Churchill, ‘there are discussed at least two or three problems which would have filled a whole session before the first war’. Weary ministers and advisers strove to make sense of the merry-go-round. ‘I see nothing intimate of UNO,’ wrote traveller Freya Stark from the United Nations in Paris; ‘the fact is that everyone is hectically busy, away all day on committees … the leisurely feel of the old days in Geneva has gone … there is a desperate feeling of trying to cope with the floods of people – UNO, European Defence, Atlantic Pact, American Aid, a huge octopus organization’.5

The old distinction between foreign and domestic issues no longer held.

Language and technology added to the frustrations of multilateral diplomacy. Consecutive interpretation functioned with mind-numbing slowness, every sentence repeated in all working languages. Historian Arnold Toynbee compared his experience of the Paris peace conferences of 1919 and 1946: ‘In 1919 the principal representatives of the powers had been in a human enough relation with each other to be able to quarrel; and they had commanded the necessary means of linguistic communication for quarrelling vocally, thanks to Clemenceau’s being able to speak English … In 1946 all interchanges between the principal delegates were channeled through interpreters. The life was taken out of the proceedings by the lengthiness and boringness of the process of translation.’6

The success of simultaneous interpretation at the Nuremberg war crimes trials led to its adoption by the United Nations. It saved time, but prolix speeches delivered in a monotone without the inflexions and nuances of the original emerged worse in translation. An ‘Oh, my God’ from the British representative – spoken when the chair of the UN Council called upon a long-winded delegate – ‘was heard all over America’. Politicians perfected escape strategies. At a Paris conference the UK minister for education and science Patrick Gordon Walker ‘missed a lot of the morning session because he was looking at the tapestries, this afternoon he was viewing the Impressionists, he read the papers most of the time, wore earphones unplugged, did crossword puzzles … laziest man I have ever known … ought to be dismissed’.7

The meshing of domestic and international issues quickened public interest in foreign affairs, and compounded the complexities of policymaking.

The rush of fledgling states and spiralling superpower competition turned the United Nations into a platform for Cold War confrontation. As a result, a non-aligned movement gained traction. Yet citizens still expected governments to play God. ‘What is the most important problem the government must solve over the next few months’ was the perennial Gallup question. Wartime summits stimulated wildly unrealistic expectations that conferences would solve world problems. ‘The technique of modern government becomes almost intolerably difficult’, complained one minister; ‘key ministers are hopelessly overworked. Stafford [Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer] spends his time dashing between Paris, Brussels and London, thinking out and arguing most frightfully complicated questions of international trade and payments, and somehow all this has got to be explained to the general public sometime’. Electorates of the 1940s and 1950s still trusted politicians and the state. The exposure of Anglo–French collusion and mendacity in the Suez crisis ended an age of innocence. Deference died hard. Guardian editor Alistair Hetherington recalled that years after Suez the belief lingered that the paper had ‘behaved discreditably in doubting the word of Ministers’.8

Rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 sharply defined the limits of British power, overstraining the economy and imposing a heavier burden of spending per capita than the United States.

Given the huge unprecedented challenges, the quality of leadership and the relationship between prime minister and foreign secretary were decisive. Good chemistry smoothed the way, but the make or break factor was whether the premier wanted both jobs. The Attlee–Bevin partnership was less fruitful than commonly supposed. Attlee allowed Bevin too long a leash. Unfettered by a cabinet foreign affairs committee, Bevin was authorized to chair ministerial meetings of overseas departments without constituting a committee reporting to the cabinet. As a result, policies escaped close scrutiny. Magnificent on the home front, Attlee faltered overseas. He got off to a good start, envisaging the downsizing of empire and a rethinking of international relations in a nuclear era, but would not fight his corner. Bevin and the Chiefs of Staff baulked at the suggestion of withdrawal from the Middle East and Mediterranean.

The unparalleled challenges demanded strong teamwork between premier and foreign secretary. Small and unprepossessing, Clem the clam – as King George VI nicknamed him – never wasted a word where none would do. A news clip shows him being interviewed in 1950 – so laconic that a despairing interviewer asks, ‘Have you anything to add, prime minister?’ To which Attlee replied ‘No, I don’t think so’. Truncated speech turned off dialogue. A telephone call to Frank Pakenham, minister for British zones in Germany and Austria, gave Pakenham a chance to pre-empt the use of the ‘retort monosyllabic’ by adopting it himself:

Clem Is that you, Frank?

Frank Yes.

Clem I’ve spoken to Ernie about the point you raised.

Frank Yes

Clem It’s all part of a very big picture he’s discussing with the Americans. It’s one of a number of things.

Frank Yes

Clem He’s going to get in touch with you before the end of the week

Frank Yes – thank you very much.

Clem Right. Good-bye

Frank Right [rings off]10

In cabinet Attlee doodled but never dawdled. He would start by praising the paper under discussion, then say, turning to the minister who proposed it, that he presumed he did not wish to add anything to so excellent a presentation of the case. That usually silenced him. The next step was to move rapidly to a conclusion, by saying, ‘Well, if no one has any objection, we’ll let that go’. ‘His summing-up was often blurred and incomplete and he rarely produced any constructive ideas of his own’.11 Attlee knew how to take care of himself. With sterling on the rocks he escaped to ‘Lords on Saturday morning and Wimbledon on Saturday afternoon, and went down to Chequers for the weekend’ – rereading Gibbon.12

Ernie, unlike Clem, loved to do the talking – rambling, repetitive and tactless, telling Molotov that he sounded like Hitler. Though vexed by lack of cabinet response to foreign policy questions – ‘none of them seemed interested’ – he did not welcome advice from junior ministers, ‘That young man, ’e worries me’. His jokes and anecdotes tended to strangle serious reflection. Advisers translated ‘often rambling and rather chaotic discussions’ into a coherent document, but were kept on a tight leash. For all the feisty talk of a new Palmerston, inexperienced junior ministers increasingly covered for an ailing foreign secretary.13

Churchill’s clinging to office and determination to control overseas policy in his government of 1951–5 fuelled a bitchy, acrimonious relationship with Crown Prince Eden. Consciousness of failing powers made the seventy-six-year-old the more determined in 1951 to concentrate on his hobbyhorses: defence and foreign policy. Whenever Eden went away, including honeymooning in 1952, Churchill jumped into the driving seat.

The foreign secretary’s glamour boy image of the 1930s concealed a vain, irascible, overstrung make-up. His ‘Anthony Eden’, a black Homburg hat the symbol of pre-war popularity, sat on a side table in the office where charladies dusted it reverently. In a temper he was almost uncontrollable. In Lisbon his taxi driver ignored instructions to go to the French embassy, setting off instead for the American. Halfway there Eden, realizing the mistake, went berserk. ‘It developed’, wrote his secretary ‘into a physical struggle between me trying to shut the window between us and the driver … and A.E. leaning forward to wind it down so that he might call them bloody fools!’14

Living on his nerves, unwell, and compulsively interfering, Eden was temperamentally unsuited to the premiership. Too long in the giant’s shadow, he lacked the killer instinct to challenge Churchill’s party leadership after the 1945 election defeat. Macmillan barely lasted nine months as Eden’s foreign secretary. Differing approaches to Europe and the Middle East, combined with the prime minister’s micro-management, created friction. Macmillan’s successor Lloyd was rung up thirty times over a Christmas weekend. Appointed in 1951 as a junior foreign office minister Lloyd’s sense of inadequacy is best conveyed in his own words, ‘I think there must be some mistake. I do not speak any foreign language … I do not like foreigners … I have never spoken in a Foreign Affairs debate … I have never listened to one’. From December 1955 an ‘over-promoted’ Lloyd became foreign secretary, compounding Eden’s micro-management. ‘It becomes daily more apparent’, complained an under-secretary, ‘that we have no secretary of state’. ‘WEU dinner’, noted Lloyd, ‘very long discussions about Six – Seven after dinner – my trouble is that I am so tired by the end of the day that I am incapable of remembering next day what took place the day before’.15

‘We have all been too long in office’, confessed a senior Labour leader. Tiredness and illness meant poor decisions. By the summer of 1945 Churchill and Eden were so fagged out that they ‘could no longer look at the problems properly and read the papers about them. It had become mere improvisation.’ Bevin’s health deteriorated fast – coronary thrombosis in 1946, increasingly severe angina. Sailing to New York in October 1946 he ‘collapsed as soon as he relaxed on the boat … spent each of the 3 days we have been at sea in bed till tea-time’. His junior minister noted: ‘EB is not doing well at the Council of Foreign Ministers. There is a lack of leadership, initiative and even clear thinking in our delegation. Ernest knows he is below par.’16

Serious illness ravaged Churchill’s peacetime administration of 1951–5, incapacitating premier and foreign secretary for weeks and months. Almost constant ill-health (itself ill-treated) plagued Eden until the end of 1953. A black tin box of medicines accompanied the red boxes. A severe infection and the misuse of sleeping pills and amphetamines almost certainly impaired the premier’s judgement in the Suez imbroglio. Overwork killed forward thinking.17

Wartime treadmill became post-war norm. The American loan negotiations in the autumn of 1945 required late night meetings virtually every weekday evening from mid-September to mid-December. Frequent and lengthy ministerial absences abroad tightened the screw. Bevin complained that ‘he had no minister in the FO’ since his junior ministers had arranged independently of one another, and of him’, to be in New York. Overload became part of Whitehall culture – enhancing institutional and individual self-esteem. In the 1960s Labour frontbenchers like Barbara Castle turned overload into a political virility symbol.18

A broken-backed Churchill administration was incapable of forceful and imaginative management of external policy: ‘I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing’, confessed Churchill. ‘It’s a pity we are governed by crocks’, commented a senior official. Despite the urgency of new machinery and policy options, the giant in decay had no appetite for modernizing Whitehall. Even before a major stroke in June 1953, a colleague described the old man as ‘terribly drooling … fast losing his grip’. ‘Things have gotten ten or fifteen times more complicated’, Churchill confessed; ‘the problems I now face are much greater in number and complexity than they used to be’. ‘He is, of course,’ concluded Macmillan, ‘physically and mentally incapable of a serious negotiation’. Stiffened with champagne and piloted by the cabinet secretary the warlord managed routine business but lacked the will and energy to follow up ideas and descry the whole field of policy. Early in 1954 two senior ministers informed him he was unfit to be prime minister; by the summer Macmillan and others considered him mentally unbalanced.19

Horror stories about overstretch abounded. ‘One has got used during these past three years to apparently insoluble programmes of work’, recorded one of Bevin’s secretaries, ‘but at the beginning of last week I really thought our machine would crack under it. S of S [Secretary of State] himself was unwell, we were one short and there was never a clear run in which to make our preparations for New York … The pressure is becoming appalling, and Niko [Nicholas Henderson] and I are really finding it hard to keep our heads above water.’ A permanent secretary tracked the pressures: ‘The mind revolted against the reading of discourses and articles that had no immediate bearing on day-to-day problems. The next resistance erected would be against aimless discussions at large about foreign affairs … the mind was attempting to shed all but the inescapable task of dealing with essential interviews or with the flow of papers.’ An FO junior minister found the job overwhelming: ‘I have been busier than ever before in my life, not only is it too tiring, but it prevents one ever reading the press properly or talking to one’s friends or fellow members [MPs]. Already I feel out of touch with everything but the FO which is thoroughly bad for my judgment’.20

Parliament and cabinet contributed little to policy-making. Decision-making preceded parliamentary discussion and was rarely influenced by it. Backbench ginger groups – Tory Suez Group, Labour’s Little Englanders and Bevanites – were lucky if they managed to squeeze tactical concessions from ministers. Parliamentary Questions were designed to embarrass ministers rather than elicit information. They were ‘taken seriously only if it was thought that the Member who tabled a question already knew the answer so that he could put an embarrassing supplementary’. Unlike committees of the United States Congress, defence and foreign affairs committees had no power to subpoena ministers and officials. Labour Party left winger Aneurin Bevan reprimanded the wartime coalition for evasiveness on external policy: ‘The ordinary man … has been spending his life for the last couple of generations in this will-o’-the wisp pursuit of power, trying to get his hands on the levers of big policy, and trying to find out where it is, and how it was that his life was shaped for him by somebody else. We were convinced by our institutions and representative democracy that the House of Commons itself was that instrument … but these debates … have convinced me that the House of Commons is becoming almost irrelevant.’21

In theory, the cabinet was a forum for review and discussion; in practice, it had ‘no common basis to its thinking … quite unequal to big decisions’. Power lay with ad hoc committees which did not report to cabinet – their existence unknown to many cabinet members. Too engrossed in their own patch, ministers could not keep up with international affairs, and pressure of business left no time for discussion. ‘Foreign affairs statements’ were ‘the least invigorating part of Cabinet business’ and a really good foreign affairs debate in the cabinet was a rare event. This suited senior ministers. Chancellor Hugh Dalton preferred not to initiate discussions on foreign affairs in the cabinet ‘where so many knew so little and, if you gave them an opening, talked so much’. Various ploys discouraged debate. Attlee’s fire-extinguisher style closed down issues: ‘it is no good your coming here so ill-prepared and wasting everyone’s time.’ Restricted distribution of FO telegrams blocked informed debate. In his premiership of 1951–5 Churchill could count on affection and loyalty for an elder statesman inhibiting unwelcome discussion. A professed liking for free ranging debate usually meant lengthy Churchillian monologues, with colleagues slipping away as lunchtime approached; another ploy was to send for Eden and talk him out of circulating papers.22

Even the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the most important international crisis since the war, did not engage the whole cabinet: ‘I told the Cabinet about Cuba,’ recorded Macmillan, ‘which they are quite happy to leave to me and Alec Home’ [foreign secretary]. Labour premier Harold Wilson sought to concentrate all decisions in his own hands. The decline of the full cabinet can be measured in the frequency of meetings and papers circulated. The Attlee government averaged 87 meetings annually with 340 papers; by the early 1970s the average was 60 and 140 memoranda. The tendency to settle everything in committee ensured perfunctory discussion on core items. By centralizing decision-making in specialist committees Wilson bypassed the cabinet. The full cabinet was encouraged to talk itself out. ‘We shall go into Europe on a wave of exhaustion’, noted one minister. ‘Just boring our way in’, a colleague scribbled back. In 1967 Richard Crossman, Lord President, urged a committee on devaluation unaware that one already existed. Wilson conceded that it was ‘increasingly difficult for a minister to play a constructive role in the collective business of the government as a whole’.23

Foreign policy was not formulated in committee. Attlee and Churchill did not revive the pre-war foreign affairs committee, and the defence committee met infrequently. The merging of external affairs departments in the 1960s strengthened prime ministerial influence. In 1945 overseas policy had seven cabinet representatives: foreign, commonwealth and colonial secretaries, together with three secretaries of state for the army, navy and air force, and a minister for defence; by 1968 there were only two cabinet ministers for external affairs, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary: ‘the external departments had little prospect of winning their case unless the prime minister himself threw his weight behind them.’24

After lauding Attlee’s engine room as ‘the acme of efficiency’, a historian of British government recanted, acknowledging that ‘administrative elephantiasis’ better describes it. ‘The coincidence of the end of the war with the beginning of the new Labour government’, observed a cabinet office economist, ‘has put a strain of work on the central Whitehall machine such as I cannot remember since I came to Whitehall in 1940’. Ministers were alerted that ‘the increasing volume of international work was already in danger of imposing intolerable strains on the machinery of national government’. In 1954 a senior politician sounded the alarm: ‘The civil service gives us loyal, devoted and competent service; but the chief officers … like the ministers, are so encumbered with a host of problems that very few have time or energy left to sit back and think’. Lord Hailsham, Lord President in the Macmillan government, warned ‘the present system’ was ‘breaking down’. Cabinet secretary Norman Brook confided that he would not be able ‘to carry on … without having a physical and mental breakdown’.25

The mandarinate was part of the problem. Public school and Oxbridge-educated officials distrusted outsiders. Strict enforcement of the Official Secrets Act strengthened inwardness, minimizing interaction with non-governmental communities and inhibiting the exploration of alternatives. Entrants learned on the job without formal training. The institutional ethos prized generalists rather than specialists, privileging conformity, hierarchy and cooperation rather than creativity, originality and imagination. The emphasis on hierarchy and conformity made it more difficult to speak the truth to those in power. By the 1950s the higher civil service, virtually unchanged since the mid-Victorian reforms implementing the 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan Report, urgently required a make-over. The absence of specialist training comparable to France’s ENA presented a glaring deficiency. ‘By general European standards’, concluded civil servant and poet Charles Sisson, ‘the education of our administrators is inadequate and their training slipshod’.26

The Whitehall bubble isolated senior officials. A cabinet office official ‘felt uncomfortable’ about the ‘strange restricted world with narrow frontiers of convention’ that bounded the lives of the mandarinate, noting: ‘most of them move and have their daily being in a sort of intellectual camp, bounded by the House of Parliament, the Embankment … Charing Cross, Northumberland Avenue, Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall, St. James’s Park, Storey’s Gate and so back to Parliament Square, a narrow world indeed where the only outsiders were banner carrying deputations … and where most of the pubs were clubs’. In the 1930s upper echelons lived in central London, enjoying a social life that enabled them to see the world ‘through other than Whitehall eyes’; by the 1950s few could afford to do so and found it hard to maintain social contacts outside official life. An Olympian-like conviction that the mandarinate had a monopoly of wisdom produced ‘a certain disregard of the world of ideas, on the one hand, and what might be called common opinion on the other’.27

Whitehall asserted superior knowledge and wisdom. A discussion of defence issues between a scientific adviser and a distinguished cabinet secretary ‘was at cross-purposes’ until the adviser discovered that the cabinet secretary believed Aden was an island. A hermetic machine blurred issues, making it more difficult to assess their unique features. From wartime Washington DC Isaiah Berlin described the process: ‘I have talked to no labor leaders or intellectuals, nobody but officials now for so long that I am beginning to acquire that frosted glass view of events … dim contours each very much like the other – which I realize is the typical officials’ normal panorama and not a cynical defeatist vision at all’. Whitehallese, especially Foreign Office speak, reinforced the bubble, blocking effective communication. In Churchill’s words, ‘If you want a line of policy from an F.O. memorandum you must send either the paragraphs with even numbers or those with odd numbers. Every alternate paragraph begins “On the other hand…”’28

Civil service reform stayed on the back burner. Critics inveighed against amateurishness, a dearth of economic and scientific expertise, and the social exclusiveness of the top tier administrative class. Anthony Sampson’s best-selling broadside against the establishment, Anatomy of Britain (1962), targeted dilettantism and the old boy network. Several years passed before the publication of the deeply flawed Fulton Report of 1968. In the meantime, Labour’s restructuring of government stretched the service to its limits.29 Why did the modernizing Labour government of 1964–70 miss the opportunity for a fundamental rethink? Whitehall’s culture of complacency and secrecy deterred root and branch reform: ‘The gentleman in Whitehall knows best … and the gentleman who dares to question Whitehall is no gentleman.’ The service’s reputation as ‘the best in the world’ shielded it from investigation. The Fulton Report, wrote the official historian of the civil service, ‘might have been modified by strong, external political leadership’, but Wilson and his allies were ‘uninterested in serious reform’. By the mid-1960s the public viewed the higher civil service as ‘overmanned’ and ‘overpaid’ – incoming Labour ministers in 1964 were said to be suspicious of their permanent advisers. Thereafter Whitehall was ‘subjected to a decade of vilification … as a principal cause of Britain’s relative decline and ungovernability’.

The FO, the main engine of overseas policy, occupied Giles Gilbert Scott’s citadel-like Victorian palazzo. The department was unfit for purpose. ‘It needs the most drastic overhaul, physically and morally,’ warned a senior diplomat in 1945, ‘it’s not that the average ability isn’t high enough, but the whole machine is slow, cumbrous and obsolete; and there is still too much of the anointment with holy oil.’ Nevertheless, the FO had to wrestle with more challenges than at any other point in its history: its own obsoletism, the modernizing Eden–Bevin reforms of 1943; Cold War defections of senior diplomats; the Suez affair; two major external investigations of the service within a decade; amalgamation in 1968 with the Commonwealth Relations Office to form the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Having the worst public image of all Whitehall departments did nothing for morale. The FO was the favourite whipping boy of politicians, press and Treasury. The antics of Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers in Roy Boulting’s film Carlton-Browne of the FO (1959) traded on the popular perception of diplomats as an effete, effeminate enclave of striped suits, rolled umbrellas and rolled-up minds. Labour’s foreign secretary George Brown, denounced ‘cynical, long-haired young gentlemen toddling from one cocktail party to another, never meeting ordinary people, and proclaiming a belief in nothing at all’.30

Isolated within Whitehall as well as from the general public, the department skirmished regularly with Treasury knights, MPs and press barons. From their trenches diplomats repelled critics, oversaw internal reform and tried to rebuild morale shattered by spy scandals and fall-out from the Suez affair. Former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd recalled a ‘defensive mood’ when he joined in the 1950s; ‘people were trying to take things away from us or to hit us, or to change things in a way which we thought unreasonable’. In the early post-war years the implementation of the 1943 Foreign Service Act, the ‘Eden–Bevin reforms’, liberalizing recruitment and creating for the first time a unified foreign service, had priority. Westminster and the press kept close tabs on the modernization. The exclusion of women until 1946 – apart from Mrs Mops and ‘typewriter ladies’ – represented an incalculable loss of talent. The service admitted only four women between 1946 and 1948, none occupied senior positions in the 1950s and the first woman ambassador was only appointed in 1976. All entrants were thrown in at the deep end, learning on the job – by contrast, Quai d’Orsay candidates spent over two years at the ENA, while State Department recruits followed a training programme at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI).31

The Treasury harried the FO mercilessly. A 1955 report censured diplomats for leisurely habits of work, overly rigid divisions between departments and a negative attitude to criticism. The Treasury, supported by the Board of Trade, succeeded in the mid-1950s in dominating policy-making on Europe. From the early 1960s the department regained ground, only to lose it to Downing Street after 1964. Treasury knights decisively shaped ministerial approaches to Europe in two instances: from June to December 1955, as the ECSC Six launched new integration initiatives, the Treasury led the definition of policy; in 1960–1 Sir Frank Lee, joint permanent secretary at the Treasury, and Freddie Bishop, deputy secretary of the cabinet, initiated significant changes in official attitudes towards the EEC.

Obsolescence was the biggest obstacle to coherent policymaking. ‘Exasperation amounting to demoralization (and I mean it) at the obsoletism of the FO machine,’ complained an official. Attlee protested repeatedly about ‘the dilatory practice of the Foreign Office’ – on one occasion waiting four days for an answer to a request for information. FO departments inhabited ‘a little world of their own’, putting up ‘suggestions which are clearly in conflict with the government’s domestic policy and even with our own foreign policy in some other part of the globe’. Multiplication of staff and paper gave ‘little time to think, to look ahead and to make wise long-term plans’. Overseas postings offered more leisure – future Conservative foreign secretary Douglas Hurd found time in the 1950s to write novels. Economics was the department’s Achilles heel. An entrant in 1945 was ‘struck by the fact that hardly any of the career members knew any economics’. Only political jobs carried prestige – ‘consular, economic and commercial jobs were considered demeaning’. Not until 1944 did the Foreign Office acquire its own set of economic advisers. Economic work had less appeal because it was more intellectually demanding – no short cuts, no skimming or skipping. The downgrading of economic expertise represented a huge disability at a time when it mattered more than ever. Treasury permanent secretary Sir Frank Lee conceded that relations with Europe had suffered ‘by reason of the comparative indifference with which FO ministers have tended in the past to regard the economic issues involved in the problem of the Six and the Seven’.32

Permanent secretaries mostly functioned as office managers, not policy-makers. Alexander Cadogan kept a detailed diary but offered no suggestions on how things might be better ordered. ‘Moley’ Orme Sargent, his Cassandra-like successor, did not push his views. Bereft of political skills he resembled ‘a philosopher strayed into Whitehall. He knew all the answers; when politicians did not want them he went out to lunch’. Reserved, tactful, cautious to a fault, William Strang was ‘not a policy-maker such as one might expect from a Permanent Under-Secretary’. A grammar-school entrant, he was ‘constantly exhibited like a prize heifer as a proof of our profound democracy’. The bustling and combative Ivone Kirkpatrick ‘did not like meetings or advice, acted on his own’ and ‘had little use for research or analysis or for prolonged discussion’. Frederick Hoyer Millar brought a touch of the old grandee style. A private fortune enabled him to take time off to attend Ascot or a parade of the Scots Guards, and to distribute grouse from his Perthshire estate. Rarely intervening in policy matters, the restoration of office morale after Suez preoccupied him. Brisk, energetic and hardworking Harold Caccia ‘immersed himself in policy’ and made frequent interventions. In the autumn of 1964 he initiated the first daily conferences of senior officials. Paul Gore-Booth appeared overwhelmed by events and personalities – Duncan enquiry (1969), merger of the FO and CRO (1968), and not least foreign secretary George Brown. Gore-Booth lacked empathy – never extending a ‘timely word of thanks and praise’ to the many forced to take early retirement as a result of office reorganization. Nor did he battle for his staff – allowing Brown to sack the ambassador in Paris, Sir Patrick Reilly. ‘The particular manner’, noted an obituarist, ‘of his unswerving loyalty to his master was not … fully intelligible to his younger colleagues’.33

Divided control presented a huge handicap in formulating a coherent policy. In 1945 nine separate ministries with different communication systems shared responsibility for overseas policy. By 1964 the main stakeholders were the FO, CRO and CO. Bevin and Eden had to argue and agree policy with the Commonwealth and Colonial Secretaries. Multilateralism cut across ministerial and departmental boundaries. The urgency of economic, financial and strategic issues brought incessant consultation and bargaining with core Whitehall players via interdepartmental committees on which the FO was one voice among many. Until the late 1950s the economic ministries drove foreign economic policy – a key committee on European integration had only one FO representative. The reconciling of conflicting viewpoints absorbed energies, lengthening lead times. Excessive coordination, complained a Labour politician, meant that the workload on a minister was much greater in the mid-1960s than during the Second World War. What took three hours to decide in 1944 often took three months in 1965.34

Did leadership deficiencies and a ramshackle engine spell relegation? Not necessarily. Thinking in time would have sparked innovative ideas. Foreign secretaries and grandees nursed a deep aversion to forward thinking. Sans think tanks and effective coordinating machinery, the highly compartmentalized conduct of day-to-day business proved a liability. Prime resources – the library and research department – were tucked away in a dingy block south of the Thames. By spring 1949 when Bevin authorized a permanent under-secretary’s committee (PUSC) ‘to identify the longer-term trends in international affairs’ the defining decisions for the coming decade were already taken. Eden allowed the committee to wither.

Six years on the FO established a planning section – staffed by one middle-ranking diplomat. Responding to recommendations in the Plowden Report of 1964 the department rustled up more staff, but the unit did not play a mainstream role until the early 1970s. The history of structured reflection, confessed a permanent secretary, was ‘one of much trial and a good deal of error … work suffered from papers being submitted to detailed scrutiny by senior people who had not the time to supervise them properly’. Planners ‘did not proceed from an assessment of British interests but … from the fact of Britain’s strained economic situation … rarely did the policy thinkers try to start from the bottom up … to define in some detail where British interests lay and then decide what the priorities were.’35

Bevin claimed to be ‘following a plan which had been carefully worked out, and which would take at least five years before it assumed its final shape’, but there was little sense of a defined current policy, let alone a five-year plan. ‘One of my first actions’, recalled one of Bevin’s junior ministers, ‘was to approach a certain very shrewd and experienced official to ask innocently for some document which would tell me just what the current foreign policy … was’. The answer was ‘not merely that no such document existed’ but ‘that it was really rather doubtful whether we had a foreign policy in the proper sense at all’.36

Two big external inquiries within a decade – Plowden (1964), Duncan (1969) – and a merger with the Commonwealth Office demoralized diplomats. ‘Since 1962’, protested permanent secretary Paul Gore-Booth, ‘we have been under examination, amalgamation, merging, re-organizing and now we are under examination again’. Rated ‘weak and ineffective’, Gore-Booth had his work cut out to keep the ship afloat. Policy-makers lacked an effective planning unit. In the 1950s a one-man section in the Western Organizations department oversaw a global waterfront. Tipped off about the recommendations of the Plowden Report the department scrambled to create an independent unit under Michael Palliser. Palliser fought for several months to secure an office close to the Secretary of State’s room. Lacking resources and access to ministers, planners had to sell their ideas to operational departments. The expanded section produced little on France and Europe: ‘We … kept off the European issue because there were so many people working on it, our job was really to act as a catalyst, and the European issue was already at the top of the agenda.’37

De Gaulle’s second veto highlighted troubling gaps in policy research. Defence minister Denis Healey requested urgently ‘three contingency studies’: a study of how free we would be ‘over the next three years to change our policies … to our own advantage’; an investigation of areas like technology where it might be an advantage to keep good relations with the Community; a review of alternative relationships between West European states, including a collective relationship between EFTA and the EEC. Reappointed foreign secretary in March 1968, Stewart set up ‘quarterly talks’ with planning staff, making known his preference for big, open-ended questions: ‘I … suggest that they should consider the question of how an affluent argumentative society – such as the West – can keep in condition to resist Communism’s Spartan attitude.’38

The lack of a wider non-governmental international affairs community impoverished policy-making. Retreat from power did not spark a national conversation or interaction between government and lay opinion. Gold star international networks like the Bilderberg and Konigswinter conferences gave the political elite opportunities to talk to foreign counterparts but not fellow citizens. By the early 1950s the principal think tank, Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), looked decidedly staid. Denis Healey found the American Council on Foreign Relations in New York ‘much more effective … in engaging the interest of key figures from the city outside’. In 1954 the Observer and the Manchester Guardian berated the think tank for ‘lack of purpose … and a certain failure to make a proper impact on the public mind … There are numerous discussion groups, frequent conferences, a massive list of publications … But there is little or no guidance to distinguish between what really matters and what is of only marginal importance … It is by fostering vigorous controversy on key problems that Chatham House can best fulfill its role’. As the FO emerged from its carapace, Chatham House retreated. From 1958 the FO Research Department made several overtures, inviting feedback on its papers; ‘we have felt for some time that some of these papers would have benefited from the advice of experts outside the Foreign Service’. Wary of working with Whitehall because of the press onslaught and the receipt of FO funding, director Kenneth Younger repelled advances: ‘although our relations with the FO are quite close we are in no way part of the official machine. I think if we were to join this group, people would draw the contrary conclusion.’39

Policy-makers not only failed to think in time, they neglected a prime resource – the usable past. The governing elite seemed indifferent to the national experience and institutional memory. Drawing on a multi-decade career as official historian of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), Professor Margaret Gowing criticized government for ‘neglecting history’. Historians, she pointed out, were just as necessary to government as economists. Frequent changes of people, policies and machinery obliterated institutional memory: ‘In my 33 years as an official historian, working on thousands of recent files in many government departments … I have found that the recording even of high policy has often been inadequate and that when the record exists, subsequent policy formation has often taken no account of it or has misunderstood it.’40

‘If you want to reform a great institution’, remarked a cabinet secretary of the 1990s, ‘you must understand it; and if you want to understand it, you need to understand its past’. Cabinet secretary Norman Brook’s ‘funding experience’ initiative of 1957 attempted to change attitudes and encourage Whitehall in-house narratives but soon ran into the sands. In practice, ‘the historical dimension was more frequently ignored than used by policymakers’. The initiative foundered because no provision was made for monitoring and review. Government had no interest in keeping up reform momentum. Historical memory building initiatives were considered soft targets for spending cuts. Two fundamental questions went unexamined: the integration of in-house histories into current policy-making; making Whitehall history part of mainstream academic history, and bringing academics and practitioners into conversation.41

Ex-diplomat Harold Nicolson eulogized British diplomacy ‘as almost miraculously effective – continental critics are united in the awe with which they regard … our masterly handling of the balance of power’. Zeal for his old profession got the better of Nicolson. The FO was unfit for purpose. ‘The root of the trouble’, observed an official, ‘is that we are, no doubt inevitably, trying to deal with problems which are the direct product of new conditions and circumstances by applying completely worn-out standards’. Instead of thinking through issues the FO attempted ‘to recreate those conditions which produced the kind of status which it believed was Britain’s right, rather than adapting to the new power-political conditions existing at the end of the Second World War’.42

The Attlee government had an opportunity to revaluate national strategy and devise appropriate initiatives. The Times considered that ‘If Mr Attlee and his chief colleagues have both the will and the capacity to seize the chance offered to them, they can transform the quality of government almost over-night. Their opportunity is nothing less than the salvation of Britain: it is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the difficulties with which they are confronted’. The mix of obsolescent engine and exhausted leaders produced inadequate responses. The American loan talks in the autumn of 1945 that helped lock Britain into a dependency culture did not have to take the form they did. Ministers ‘had not seriously studied alternatives, such as consultations with other West European countries’. Commenting on the Macmillan government’s rethinking of attitudes towards Europe in the late 1950s, the editor of Documents on British Policy Overseas remarked: ‘in the typical British manner this reversal of policy came several years after the initial policy had begun to crumble.’43

An episode of the TV sitcom Dad’s Army epitomized the prevailing back-of-an envelope, muddling-through culture: German invasion forces in 1940 enjoy a large HQ and detailed maps – Captain Mainwaring, commander of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, relies on the village hall and an AA road map. Muddling through occasionally worked and officials cheered: ‘There was an amazing process of muddling through but it came out quite well’, enthused a Ministry of Defence official on the Wilson government’s decision of 1967 to withdraw from east of Suez. Mostly it didn’t. Thinking in time was no panacea but with so few cards in hand it was essential to play them with the utmost skill and deliberation. At the end of the day Bevin relaxed and let his mind ‘expand’ with Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry. Alas, liberal servings of sherry and the foreign secretary’s ‘’edgerows of experience’ were not enough.44