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

The demands on the PUS from the 1980s to the 1990s remained enormous. Modern Permanent Under-Secretaries have, however, frequently found that the provision of policy advice has taken second place to resource management.

The balance between the two has very often depended on the relationship established between the PUS and the Secretary of State, and upon the latter's experience and inclinations. John Major was new to foreign affairs and during his brief spell as Foreign Secretary in 1989 he clearly had in the first instance to rely upon the expertise of his permanent staff. As so often in the past, it fell to the PUS and his senior colleagues to provide continuity of advice on foreign policy. The responsibility of officials has in this respect been eased by the political consensus which has tended to prevail on what constitutes the 'national interest' and on the obligations imposed by Britain's overseas alliances and alignments. There were, however, occasions during the 1980s when the bipartisan approach to foreign policy appeared to be under the severest of strains. As leaders of the Labour opposition, both Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock advocated alternative non-nuclear defence policies and a withdrawal from membership of the European Community. Quite how officials might have responded to this agenda was never tested but, speaking in the 1980s, the meticulously professional Sir Antony Acland, PUS during 1982-86, made the following point:

'I think that if a government were to decide to take Britain out of Europe, that would be very unsettling and worrying for a large number of members of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and I think for home civil servants as well. But there are other issues too which would cause them great anxiety: I think the withdrawal from NATO, or going wholly unilateralist, would also cause great anxieties in the minds of quite a number of us. But I suppose in foreign affairs there has been a greater tradition of bipartisan policy over the years than on other issues, and it may have been comforting and consoling for us.'

Nonetheless, there was never a suggestion that Acland would have worked in opposition to his political masters. The PUS can put forward alternative policies, yet in the final analysis, he has to implement the policy propounded by the government of the day.

Parliament also started to play a greater role in the life of the PUS from the 1980s. Appearances before the Public Accounts Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, for example, occurred at least once a year.

Sir Patrick Wright, PUS during 1986-91, was astonished to be told by Denis Greenhill that he had never once appeared before the Public Accounts Committee. Wright's successor, Sir David Gillmore, found such Committees extremely daunting and recollected from his time as PUS that: 'there were moments when I was overcome with complete terror at the whole idea of doing it'. Gillmore's only solace was that he became 'so damn busy' that he didn't have time to be frightened. Many modern PUSs would regard their primary role as being to run the Service, and to promote its interests. Wright estimated that running the Service took up about 65% of his time, adding:

'I remember reading Sir Alexander Cadogan's diaries and realising, rather to my shame, that my personal, written contributions of policy advice (as opposed to the submissions emerging from the Department or the PUS's Planning Committee) had been few and far between – as compared with the magisterial minutes on Foreign Policy which Cadogan addressed regularly to his Ministers.'

Wright's greatest concern as PUS was the lack of resources to maintain Britain's position in the Security Council, and to conduct a global foreign policy. He argued in particular that the FCO should be allocated sufficient resources for information technology, in which he considered the office to be woefully behind. Like his predecessors, Wright had also to respond to social changes which affected the aspirations and requirements of staff, and career patterns within the Service. He had to tackle the problem posed by diplomatic spouses (of both sexes), with careers of their own. Many of them were increasingly in well paid professions at home, and less than enthusiastic about joining their Service partners on postings abroad. By the time his tenure as PUS came to an end, Wright believed there was 'a much better appreciation with the Service that our job is, and must be seen to be, the vigorous and skilful promotion and protection of British interests, rather than some woolly objective called 'good relations''.

Gillmore was also a resolute guardian of the Service's welfare and reputation. In giving evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 1993, he explained 'when we lose a mission on the ground, we lose information, we lose an ability to assess the policies of that government and we lose the ability to foresee problems which could be caused for Great Britain'. By 1991, the FCO employed 6,400 people in 220 posts around the world but faced competing attractions from what Gillmore called 'giddy times in the City with black Porsches and black filofaxes'. During a time of rising political tensions in Europe, Gillmore proved to be a calm and clear communicator, while forging a good working relationship with Douglas Hurd. He had himself followed an unconventional path to the post of PUS. One of his first jobs was with a plastics company in Paris and after several years in France he went on to teach in the East End of London. It was only at the age of 36 that he joined the Service by the late entrants' examination. He made his name during 1978 when he went to Vienna as Counsellor and Deputy Head of the British Delegation to the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks. However, apart from postings to Moscow in 1972 and Kuala Lumpur in 1983, Gillmore, unlike many of his more recent predecessors, did not have a series of important positions abroad. On his return from Malaysia in 1986, Gillmore became Deputy Under-Secretary of State with responsibilities for the Americas and Asia.

Appointed PUS only after the Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, had overruled the nomination of another candidate for the post, Gillmore presided over the Office at a time when political differences over Britain's future role in the EC were becoming ever more apparent. He also set in hand the fundamental reform of the structure and management of the FCO, and encouraged the greater use of the latest information technology within the Service. A clear and calm communicator, he was the first PUS to have a word processor on his desk. He later observed:

'It's fine to make brilliant policy, but if you have no means to carry it out, or can't produce the means, or don't know how the means can be extracted from the system, then you're whistling a bit in the dark.'

Gillmore did not forget policy but recoiled from asserting any right to be the funnel through which all advice should reach the Foreign Secretary. And at a time of radical change abroad, he remained confident of Britain's global role. 'Wherever I go', he remarked in 1994, 'I'm instantly struck by the continued attention paid to our views, the continued interest in what is going on in this country and the passionate devotion to our institutions in countries where you'd least expect it.'

By the time of Sir John Coles's appointment as PUS in 1994, the time and effort devoted to Parliament, the media and public opinion in general had spiralled to unprecedented levels. The demands of public diplomacy coupled with the impact of the latest communications and information revolution meant that Coles felt himself unable to devote the attention he would have wished to policy matters. He later recalled in his book, Making Foreign Policy: A Certain Idea of Britain (John Murray, 2000), that more than one Cabinet Minister had lamented this development. It might indeed be argued that a century of reform, restructuring and retrenchment has still left unresolved the fundamental problem that Tenterden confronted in 1876 and Eyre Crowe addressed in 1905. The routine administration of business has left senior officials with insufficient time in which to focus upon broader considerations of policy.

Crowe's prime concern was not, however, so much with the role of the PUS as with the advisory functions of the Office as a whole. And while officials in Whitehall may nowadays still feel themselves overburdened by the pressures of current business, administrative reform and modern technology have relieved them of many of the those essentially clerical duties which Crowe's generation considered both onerous and demeaning. One of the achievements of the Crowe/Sanderson reforms was the establishment of a General Registry — a repository of information which in contemporary office-speak might be classed as an innovation in knowledge management. Yet by its nature, this still left a fund of knowledge inadequately utilised by a small team in Whitehall. Since Acland's tenure as PUS, Permanent Under-Secretaries have grappled with the need to introduce an effective, and up-to-date, communications system, both within the Office and with posts abroad. Soon after his appointment as PUS in 1997, Sir John Kerr recognised the need for the FCO to acquire an information technology system which would 'allow a policy paper destined for the Foreign Secretary to be constructed on-line between the Department and the experts in the post'. He went on to champion a policy which has helped to transform 'the FCO from an HQ with outstations into a single on-line global organisation'.

In striking the balance between management head and policy adviser, Kerr also attached great weight to policy content and the selling of it through presentation. He reasserted the PUS's role as the Foreign Secretary's principal adviser on foreign affairs, maintaining that in one of his various guises he could, when on missions abroad, be said to be acting in some sense as 'deputy foreign minister'. The latter is not a position which either Hammond or Sanderson would have presumed to hold; but Hardinge, Vansittart and many of their successors could have described themselves as such. The office has evolved, and remains without a job description. Personality and the relationship established between the PUS, the Secretary of State and their subordinates have, as much as political circumstances, helped determine the office holder's influence on policy. It is notable that Kerr claimed that what has pleased him most during his tenure has been 'females, Firecrest and Foresight'—the promotion of women to senior positions in the Service, the adoption of the Office's new computerised communications system, and the grass roots campaign aimed at mapping out the future of the Office. All three related to the smooth-running of the diplomatic machine, upon which the PUS's contribution to policy has very often depended. Meanwhile, the FCO has itself had to adjust to the further intrusion of other Government Departments into the management of external affairs and, as in earlier periods, No. 10 has sometimes exercised more than a mediatory function in policy coordination. The diplomatic agenda has broadened, overseas representation has expanded, and resources have rarely matched aspirations. Recent Permanent Under-Secretaries have, like their mid-Victorian predecessors, had to cope with the consequences of administrative restructuring at home and revolutionary change abroad.