Suzanne Heywood

I could barely stop reading this book after it got it. I only stopped for meals and some sleep and finished it over 3 days. What an amazing, true story. I knew how it turned out but I kept reading to find out how she got to where she is today. She is an amazing writer and story teller. To comprehend that she spent 10 years of her life, (from age 7 to 17) on this ship is such miserable circumstances with no emotional support from anyone, including her parents is shocking.
I have nothing but compassion for her and admiration for what she has achieved in spite of it all.… (meer)

At the age of seven, Suzanne Heywood's parents announced they were going to sail the route of Captain James Cook, taking their two young children with them, a journey they planned would take three years. Little could Sue know how long the voyage would really last and how much of her childhood would be spent deprived of the kinds of experiences most children take for granted. She would also be deprived of the opportunity for a normal education. This is the story of one girl's desperate fight for a normal life and the opportunity to be educated, something that seemed as elusive as the safe harbours her family seemed often to be searching for in their boat.… (meer)

I was a (very) junior Civil Servant for thirty years, from 1980 to 2010. I spent the first ten years as a desk clerk in Social Security; but on the privatisation of water in 1989 and the establishment of the regulator's office (Ofwat) in Birmingham rather than Whitehall, I took level transfer to the new organisation (and was later promoted). I was still very junior (even after promotion), but I suddenly found myself a fly on the wall, if not in the room where policy decisions were being made, then often in the corridor outside those rooms. I also had the opportunity to see behind the scenes and understand what went into decision-making.

So when this book was published to glowing testimonials from some of the Great and the Good, I felt I should read it. It covers much of the period I was at Ofwat, and although water was not on the policy agenda whilst Jeremy Heywood was working in Whitehall - and perhaps it ought to have been - the world he moved within was not unfamiliar to me. Many of the names casually dropped were familiar to me, mainly because they were often bandied about, either in office chit-chat between more senior colleagues or in some of the more perceptive current affairs programmes of the time. The book mentions one person directly known to me - Francis Maude, MP, who took up the cause of Civil Service reform that his father started, but who seems to have been firmly in the "politicisation" corner of that debate.

Tis book was written by Heywood's widow as a memorial. It draws on a lot of interviews with politicians and civil servants in some considerable detail. To begin with, I found myself slightly nonplussed; we are thrust directly into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis of 1992 as Heywood was at the side of Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, as his Principal Private Secretary (PPS). We follow his career as PPS to subsequent Chancellors - first Kenneth Clarke and then Gordon Brown. He then moved to work as a policy secretary with Prime Ministers Tony Blair and (after a period in the private sector with an investment bank) Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May.

The book makes no concessions to any reader who is unfamiliar with the machinery of of British government, the protocols of the division between political and governmental activities, or the backgrounds and duties of many named officials. It is nonetheless interesting to see people named who went on after Heywood's death to become more prominent in public life.

What is of interest to me in this book isn't so much the inside track on the major events of the day, but rather the insight it gives into how the British state works. What we are shown is the upper levels of the Civil Service, staffed by highly able people but all from similar backgrounds. There isn't actually any biographical background of Heywood, nor of any of his colleagues; but some research shows that he came from firm middle class origins (both parents were teachers), grew up in Glossop in Derbyshire, went to a good school and then read economics and history at Oxford and the London School of Economics. So it has to be said that he was firmly in the mainstream of the prevailing orthodoxy when it came to formulating policy. We do see how that process happens under different political masters; and we see that at that level, day-to-day decisions are more pragmatic than political. Ideological differences between governments of different colours are very much in the background and form more the underpinning of the direction of government rather than an overwhelming daily objective.

To his credit, Heywood recognised this and worked to try to find ways to achieve objectives that drew on different experiences. In particular, his reaction to the "Operation Trojan Horse" issue showed someone who identified a shortcoming in the Civil Service that he put in place measures to address. "Operation Trojan Horse" concerned an anonymous letter that was sent to Birmingham City Council in 2014 alleging that there was a plan by Muslim extremists to infiltrate the Boards of Governors of Birmingham schools. In trying to address this, Heywood found that no-one in his circle of colleagues knew much about Islam, the state of education in Birmingham, or even how many mosques there were in the city. He recognised that effective government needed input from a wider range of voices than the orthodoxy offered, and so he started measures to improve the diversity available to the upper reaches of Government.

(Incidentally, the book only concentres on "Operation Trojan Horse" insofar as it shows us something about Heywood's reaction to a problem. Nothing ever came of the issue, except that there were those who failed to find any reference to the "Trojan Horse" in Islamic writings, and indeed the only reference to a "Trojan Horse" in relation to Islam was in a book written some years before by a London-based journalist, one Michael Gove. Who by 2014 was education secretary. Surely a coincidence?)

But this does illustrate a point. For all the activity that goes on in the political sphere, with the trade unions informing the development of Labour policy (at least, in theory) and Conservatives paying attention to grass roots constituency opinion (again, in theory), very little of this percolates upwards to the highest levels of government. Quite how democratic that makes us is another question.

Suzanne Heywood, Jeremy's widow, has produced a major work that peers under the curtain that conceals most day-to-day Whitehall decision making from the rest of us. I was amused to see that she knows enough of the field, when writing about "nudge economics" (persuading people in everyday life to make economic decisions by giving them small, incremental incentives to 'nudge' them towards preferred actions) to say of the economists who usually take the credit for the idea, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, that they "popularised" behavioural economics rather than invented the concept. As I'd found evidence that a civil servant in the Northern Ireland Parliament was using not only the concept but also the actual word "nudge" to describe it as long ago as the 1960s, this pleased me.

The British Civil Service comes in for a lot of uninformed criticism, sometimes from people who should know better. It has been characterised by some politicians and the media outlets they have unhealthy relationships with as "the blob", part of a "deep state" that has its own agenda that pays no attention to public opinion or the democratic process. This is dangerous nonsense. But there is a worrying degree of groupthink, and the routes that fast-track civil servants like Jeremy Heywood can take generally require specific sorts of backgrounds or education. Jeremy Heywood came from that background, yet he had the ability to see past some of the orthodoxy. His early death at the age of 56 in 2018 brings the story to an abrupt end.

The book makes no attempt to consider how events turned out after Jeremy Heywood was no longer around to manage reactions; I was particularly struck by a brief mention of his work on the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail in 2013, with some fairly candid asides about the shortcomings of existing policy, all the while being blind to the then contemporary scandal regarding the Post Office's Horizon IT system (resulting in many sub-postmasters being prosecuted for financial shortfalls that were the fault of a flawed computer system). This is not to suggest that Heywood should have known - the Post Office, by now a separate business to the Royal Mail, made a good job of concealing the truth from everyone for many years - but this only goes to show how separating everything into different silos, whether they be called cost centres, business units, or just different offices with their own leadership cadres and lines of reporting, can confound even the best minds.

Still, as a portrait of more than twenty-five years of the upper echelons of the British government, this book is invaluable.… (meer)

The account by his wife of the leading Civil Servant of his day and that included 5 prime ministers four of whom wrote in glowing terms of his abilities. Intimately involved with politicians of all colours in helping them get their policies into action, with an amazing ability to come up with solutions or compromises that worked, and getting on with all sorts of people Died very young and missed out perhaps on many of the ordinary pleasures of family life but clearly had a precious marriage and close family.
Interesting, and very profitable, few years with Merchant bankers, but much preferred to take his place at the centre of government. Very little about his upbringing, I suppose his wife was not around then, and I wondered how she managed to reconstruct his conversations and policies in such detail.
The book gave some insight into the frantic and argumentative world of high politics, and how all engrossing it has to be.… (meer)