Civil Service

Jerry is a malicious risks and resilience specialist.

With over 35 years of experience in risk management, resilience and crisis response, Jerry served in the British Army, the UK Civil Service, the UN and the private sector and has worked on more than 40 countries in four continents.

He was head of operations for the verification and initial removal of Syria's declared chemical weapons and was a senior advisor to the UN and negotiator with key people in that process.

And in 2015, he was made an ABE for services to international arms control.

No, you don't have to tell it.

The, the British Civil Service were b- a little bit skeptical, weren't they? That, A, you'd have to end up giving them money, and B, that sending people books wasn't a very good idea, essentially, or w- a lot of the books wouldn't be read.

But it's, um, it's good to, you know, it's good to hear that, A, you ignored the Civil Service, and B, that, um, Helen, um, points out they got this one wrong.

Well, well, unfortunately, I mean, I ignored the Civil Service, um, in their advice not to have the meeting with Dolly Parton, but we didn't-

... of liberalism which has led it to its own crisis, if you see what I mean.

Um- As I said at the start, reading the book, it was very easy to recognize, um, the UK Civil Service, um, which [laughs] is-

[laughs]

... often, we often describe them literally as Mandarins.

... uh, and you talk about, you know, not just in the UK, but a class of, uh, insulated, highly centralized, universally ed- university-educated technocratic elites, and you argue that they have moved liberalism away from the sort of core tenet of shared prosperity, which it, which it was originally built around.

Um, you argue, as you were saying, for a return to working class liberalism.

What are the implications of that for, say, the UK Civil Service? Does it mean that you need to completely dismantle these elites which we have built up for good reasons, which you also acknowledge in your book, the, the sort of the expertise and, you know, some well-intentioned reasons for having, uh, this class, or can you reform the civil service from within?

Well, I, I mean, I think, uh, we are in the seat of power here, and it's very, very important that we engage with what the bureaucracy, civil service side of the reforms would be.

[laughs] So we begin in MI6 HQ in Regent's Park.

Um, we get a very kind of madmen-esque view of the everyday cogs in the great machine that is MI6 and the British Civil Service.

The banality of spy work outside of the missions, you know, complete with Bond eating alone in the cafeteria, bringing his own sauce.

There's always someone who does that.

Ida Cook was born in 1904 and her older sister, Louise, was born in 1901.

The sisters grew up in England and eventually worked in the British Civil Service as typists.

Their lives were pretty ordinary.

They weren't members of an influential political family or wealthy socialites, and they certainly didn't look like people who had one day become rescuers during one of history's darkest periods.

So we could spend an hour on the 19th century, uh, Chinese civil service and how, uh, it was, the entry to it was control, but, uh, one-- we were not going, we are not going to.

[laughs]

Um, we're gonna divide it between the Chinese civil service of the 19th century and the British civil service in the 19th.

Now we're actually, we are gonna touch on the latter, but we'll move on to other things.

But it's a fascinating story.

[laughs] And on the Chine- the Chinese civil service exam at that time, as I say, is really a lot of ancient classical Chinese knowledge and languages and this eight-legged essay.

And Britain are kicking around ideas and saying, "Well, what goes on-- what-- if we're gonna have an exam, what should go on the exam?" And there've been a few, uh, kind of experiments prior to this time, and there are a few places where exams are starting to be used.

But there is this major point in eighteen fifty-four where a major report is written that proposes there should be one central exam for applicants to the civil service, the British Civil Service, and that this exam basically should consist of a lot of knowledge of the classical languages of Greek and Latin.

What's less well known is that an absence of relative status is also less well known.

And the study that you refer to are these Michael Marmot studies of the British Civil Service, which is such a huge... status game.

And they found that there was a huge health differential between people at the top of the hierarchy and people at the bottom.

And this isn't to do with them being, you know, people at the top being richer, you know, but they accounted for all of those variables in terms of kind of lifestyle and all that stuff.

No.

So originally, I actually took a kind of a career break from the British Civil Service for one year initially.

And then one year became two years and then three years.

And then actually, I just never went back again.

Now, you've got this support from these esteemed academics and doctors.

Presumably, you have the full resources of the British Civil Service at your disposal as well.

Well, I have the – no, I have my own parliamentary staff, but I do have the services of the impartial library of the House of Commons.

They're very good.