The Permanent Under-Secretary of State: A Brief History of the Office and its Holders

Prelude to Permanence

The post of Permanent Under-Secretary of State (PUS) in the Foreign Office was not, in the first instance, the creation of any administrative ordinance. Like much else in British public life, it evolved. When, on his appointment as Secretary of State in March 1782, Charles James Fox assumed sole ministerial responsibility for foreign affairs, he had a staff composed of two Under-Secretaries, a Chief Clerk, seven Junior and Senior Clerks, two chamber keepers and their deputy, and the 'necessary woman'. The Under-Secretaries drafted despatches, superintended foreign correspondence and divided up the other work of 'Mr Fox's Office' amongst the clerks. Initially, both were political appointees, but from 1795 onwards it became customary for only one Under-Secretary to be replaced with a change of ministry. As a result, the office of Permanent Under-Secretary emerged, although for many years it was usual for holders of it to regard themselves simply as senior Under-Secretaries. John Backhouse who, prior to his appointment as Under-Secretary in April 1827, had been associated politically with George Canning and had served as his private secretary both before and during his term as Foreign Secretary (1822-27), remained in post after the withdrawal of the Canningites from the Duke of Wellington's Government in 1828. Able and industrious, he came to see his position as 'permanent', and he ensured that his successors would have virtually exclusive responsibility for the management of Office business.

Formal recognition was given to Backhouse's position, as well as to that of his counterparts in the Home Office and the War and Colonial Office, in a Treasury minute of 15 April 1831. Although this was primarily concerned with proposals for reducing salaries of the three principal Secretaries of States, it drew a clear distinction between these political appointments and the 'permanent Under Secretaries' who remained in office 'during different changes of Administration, and who thus [made] a profession of Official life'. And when in March 1842 Backhouse retired, George Lenox-Conyngham, the then Chief Clerk, described his successor, Henry Unwin Addington, as 'Permanent Under-Secretary of State'. A salary differential was meanwhile established between the two Under-Secretaries, and the second or junior Under-Secretary became ever more closely identified with the Secretary of State and was expected to part office when he did. Later in the nineteenth century, when a succession of Foreign Secretaries were peers, Governments found it necessary to have an Under-Secretary in the House of Commons, and the title of Parliamentary Under-Secretary, already applied in the Treasury minute of 1831, passed into popular usage.