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

Sir Orme Sargent, Cadogan's heir as PUS, inherited an administratively unified Foreign Service, but faced an ideologically divided world. He had joined the Office in 1906 and, after spending almost two years as Second Secretary in the British Legation in Berne, had been attached first to the Peace Delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919 and subsequently to Britain's Embassy at Paris for the work of the Ambassadors' Conference. The remainder of his career, from November 1925 onwards, was spent in Whitehall, and as superintending Under-Secretary of the Central Department during the 1930s, Sargent was instrumental in helping to frame British policy towards National Socialist Germany. Nicknamed 'Moley' and with a tendency to suffer from claustrophobia, Sargent resisted any suggestions that he might be posted abroad. After promotion to Deputy Under-Secretary in September 1939, he superintended both the Office's Northern and Southern Departments. During the war he became increasingly concerned about the way in which Britain's mounting indebtedness was likely to impact upon its foreign policy. It might well, he forecast, 'involve a change in our diplomatic methods' since Britain 'could no longer rely on the weapons of the rich man'. And, as author of the influential post-war memorandum, 'Stocktaking after V-E Day', he wrestled with the problem of how to maintain Britain's position in the world through Big Three cooperation, without abdicating Britain's status as a great power through the abandonment of its interests in eastern Europe. Later, as PUS, he ominously predicted: 'The Far East seems destined to be the principal scene of a conflict of interests between the Soviet Union and the United States.' Sargent also observed that Soviet and American policies in Korea had now become contiguous and that a direct clash between the two powers was to be expected. He was not, however, inclined to press his views on ministers. As Vansittart later observed, he was 'a philosopher who strayed into Whitehall. He knew all the answers; when politicians did not want to hear them he went out to lunch.'

Sir William Strang replaced Sargent as PUS in February 1949. Educated at University College, London, Strang had entered the Diplomatic Service in 1919 after four years military service in France and Flanders. His subsequent career had included postings in Belgrade and Moscow, and, following his transfer to the Foreign Office, he accompanied Neville Chamberlain to Berchtesgarten, Bad Godesberg and Munich, and travelled to Moscow in 1939 in a vain effort to achieve an agreement with the Soviet Union.

From 1945 to 1947 he was political adviser to the Commander-in-Chief Germany, Field Marshal Montgomery. Around the time of his appointment as PUS, Strang was described by a journalist as being 'over six feet tall, slim, with a brown moustache, shy and correct'. Strang was widely regarded as a first class administrator, and on his retirement The Times commented that he 'coupled a capacity for hard work and very long hours with the analytical mind of a mathematician'. One of his principal achievements as PUS was the establishment in 1949 of a policy planning body called the Permanent Under-Secretary's Committee (PUSC). One of the most important recommendations made by the PUSC was that neither the Commonwealth nor Western Europe or the two combined, could stand on their own against the Soviet Union without the full support of the United States. In 1949, the Attlee Government effectively adopted this line of argument.

Unlike Sargent, Strang was willing to travel the globe in an effort to ascertain where Britain commanded influence and where it might be challenged. He undertook a tour of the Middle East and Asia in 1949 to this effect and his analyses of these regions were frequently reflected in the papers of the PUSC. As Foreign Secretary, Bevin was impressed by his judgement and the care and earnestness with which he submitted his recommendations. The PUSC was eventually discontinued by the incoming Conservative administration in 1951. Strang remained PUS until November 1953. After leaving the Office he published a number of works on diplomacy, including The Foreign Office (London, 1955) and Home and Abroad (London, 1956). In Home and Abroad, Strang concluded: 'My years as Permanent Under-Secretary were the happiest years of a happy career: and yet I will confess that of all those days perhaps the happiest was that on which I laid down my charge.'

Strang's immediate successor, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, fully appreciated this paradox. In his memoirs Kirkpatrick later recalled his thoughts on taking up his new position:

'From my long years of previous service in the Foreign Office I knew what was in store for me and, like any athlete, went into training. I gave up smoking and drinking, went to parties as little as I could and took a brisk walk through the park to the office every morning. Only so was I able to last the course.'

Kirkpatrick was related to a former PUS, his mother being first cousin to Charles Hardinge. He joined the Office in February 1919 after spending the previous three years in wartime intelligence and propaganda work, an activity to which he returned when in 1941 he became foreign adviser to the BBC. Serving as head of Chancery in Berlin during 1933-38, he made clear his detestation of the Nazis. His views seem not, however, to have made any great impression on the British Ambassador, Sir Neville Henderson. After 1945 he was again very much involved with German affairs, serving for a year in the Office's Germany Section and then, during 1950-53, as High Commissioner in Bonn. Kirkpatrick had a reputation as a combative, even aggressive, Irishman, who had little time for discussion. He was not, according to some of his former colleagues, the easiest of men to work with, and in Lord Gladwyn's opinion he would have made 'an excellent general'.

Kirkpatrick's difficult period as PUS culminated in the Suez Crisis of 1956, an event that was little referred to in his memoirs, The Inner Circle (London, 1959). Convinced that the nation's survival was dependent upon the exercise of great power responsibilities, he encouraged the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, in his dangerous fixation with Nasser as a Middle Eastern Hitler. The experience of the 1930s had led both men to oppose any 'appeasement' of Nasser. Kirkpatrick's closeness to Eden was reinforced by the Prime Minister's dissatisfaction with what he perceived as a pro-Arab stance held by his Foreign Office subordinates during the last Churchill administration. As a result, Eden increasingly used Kirkpatrick as an intermediary between himself and other senior officials in the Office. This close relationship took an ominous turn when the PUS found himself obliged to exclude the Foreign Office from the decision-making process during the final crisis. For Kirkpatrick, the Suez debacle was a test of Britain's great power status, leading him later to reflect that:

'No country [in the Western world] can any longer pursue an independent foreign policy. The liberty of action of each is in varying degrees restricted by the need to obtain the concurrence of one or more members of the alliance'.

Suez sullied Kirkpatrick's reputation as PUS, though he may have been guilty of no more than fulfilling a civil servant's duty of loyalty to his political chiefs.

It is perhaps hardly surprising that in the wake of Suez, Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, who succeeded Kirkpatrick in February 1957, should have sought to encourage greater inter-departmental coordination in policy planning. The administrative basis for such coordination already existed in the form of the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, a body first established in October 1949 and later developed into the Policy Planning Department. This provided a centralised policy planning structure and avoided tackling problems department by department. Hoyer Millar nonetheless also came close to being at the centre of a Middle Eastern disaster when, in the summer of 1958, airborne support was despatched to the King of Jordan without the British having gained prior consent from the Israelis for the overflight of their territory. Hoyer Millar had seemed quite sure that Israeli consent would be forthcoming, but the matter was still not resolved when British troops began landing in Amman.

A bluff, relaxed and much loved figure, Hoyer Millar was, in the words of Alistair Horne, 'as contented on a grouse-moor as his predecessor, Kirkpatrick, had been burrowing about in the corridors of power'. When Douglas Hurd became Foreign Secretary in 1989 he told Sir Patrick Wright that his ideal PUS was Hoyer Millar, who left the Office on Friday afternoon, and only returned from Scotland on Monday afternoon. Whether Hoyer Millar's relaxed style could have spared him the boxes that his predecessors and successors had to take home nightly and over the weekend is open to question. Hoyer Millar's first experience of diplomacy had been in 1922 when for a year he acted as Honorary Attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels. He later went on to serve in Berlin, Paris and Cairo and, as Minister in the British Embassy in Washington in 1948, he famously bulked at the Foreign Office's proposal to appoint Guy Burgess to the Chancery, exclaiming: 'We can't have that man. He has filthy fingernails.' Whether Hoyer-Millar knew of an alleged remark made by Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, that Burgess 'had shit in his fingernails' was not clear. The refusal produced a sharp rebuke from London to the effect that Burgess was now an established member of the Foreign Service and it was not for the Embassy to refuse to accept him. In 1952, Hoyer-Millar became Britain's first Permanent Representative to NATO and as Kirkpatrick's successor at Bonn, he was also Britain's Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. Hoyer-Millar was a good committee-man and, after retirement in January 1962, became a member of the Plowden Committee which reviewed British representation overseas.