The idea that 'special advisers' are an essential addition to any prime ministerial, or ministerial, career is a relatively new one. The original special advisers were hired by Harold Wilson in his first two governments. They were distinguished economists - Thomas Balogh, Nicholas Kaldor, Robert Neild - whose purpose as 'outsiders' was to counteract the power of the Treasury, which Wilson (not without reason) thought had an unhealthy stranglehold over the making of economic policy. They were hired because of their specific expertise. However, special advisers since this period - Bernard Ingham, Charles Powell, Alistair Campbell, Steve Hilton, Nick Timothy, Dominic Cummings - have not been in this vein. Their purpose has been to provide ideological ballast for prime ministers who have convinced themselves that the civil service is conspiring against them. Cabinet ministers such as Tony Benn who were also convinced that they were under siege from their civil servants also felt the need for their own advisers. Often politicians have seemed uncomfortable with the very idea of a non-political, 'meritocratic' Northcote-Trevelyan model of the civil service, and seem to desire some form of 18th-century patronage system.
The irony of this situation is that the days of the self-confident civil service mandarins, when figures such as Leo Pilatzky and Ian Bancroft, could speak fearlessly to Denis Healey and Margaret Thatcher are long gone. It is still has many outstanding qualities, but its character has changed, lost under a welter of performance indicators and managerialism. (For detail, see the political scientist Aeron Davis's book, 'Reckless opportunists' (2018) ). Politicians assume that if nothing seems to happen when they pull the levers of power that civil servants must be frustrating them, either because of malice or inertia (Priti Patel is only the most egregious example of this tendency). In fact, the levers of power may not be working not because of civil service intransigence but because the United Kingdom is the most over-centralised and top-heavy state in Western Europe. Politicians are discovering just how dysfunctional and devastating this administrative malady is during the current pandemic. Needless to say, this state of affairs is due to numerous decisions made by politicians over the past seventy five years, which civil servants dutifully put into practice.
Isn't it fascinating that two of the most effective British politicians of the twentieth century, those giants Aneurin Bevan and Ernest Bevin, were able to accomplish so much precisely because, despite the huge gap in life experience between them and their civil servants, they were able to trust them and work effectively with them ? Their successors would do well to ponder their example with some humility.