You've reached the top - now stop the rot

Dear Sir Andrew,

First, very many congratulations. You have not merely reached the top of your profession. You have just been appointed to the greatest post to which anyone embarking upon a career in public service can aspire. You are to be the next Cabinet Secretary. You will sit on the right hand of the Prime Minister at the Cabinet table. You will be privy to every secret of state. You are now one of the halfdozen most important men and women in public life.

Since the British constitution has never been written down, your job has never been defined. Effectively, indeed, you are the British constitution. It is up to you to step in and tell the Prime Minister when he has stepped out of line. As for Cabinet ministers, you should put the fear of God into them. You are personally responsible for the integrity and the probity of government.

None of your predecessors has ever taken over your great office at such a difficult time. Sleaze is back on the agenda. A few months ago, the Prime Minister wrote a letter to his counterpart in Romania giving an assurance that Mittal, a steel company bidding for a Romanian business, was "British". It then emerged that Mittal - though a New Labour donor - employed barely 100 out of its 125,000 worldwide employees in Britain. Tony Blair declared that he could not understand what all the ensuing fuss was about. It is your job, Sir Andrew, to remind the Prime Minister that integrity matters.

Then there was the Hinduja business, when a multi-millionaire from the Indian subcontinent was permitted - as the Hammond report admirably demonstrated - to drive a coach and horses through the rules to acquire a British passport. The Ecclestone episode, when Government policy was changed to help out a big Labour donor. Or the Jo Moore affair, when a political appointee was permitted to wreck the careers of loyal public servants. Numerous other examples could be put forward. As a Treasury man, you must have been appalled by the way that one outstanding public servant, Jill Rutter - now at BP - saw her career destroyed.

Sir Andrew, you are an official of high repute who chose public service after Enfield grammar school and higher education at Cambridge University. When you entered the civil service in 1970, it was dominated by massive and incorruptible figures. Cabinet ministers cowered in awe before the famous Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend, who demanded - and made absolutely sure that he got - the highest standards.

Since then, and I am sure you would agree, standards have declined sharply. Your two immediate predecessors as Cabinet Secretary - Robin (now Lord) Butler and Sir Richard Wilson - have quietly permitted the independence of the civil service to be subverted.

Butler was Cabinet Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, John Major and (for six months) under Tony Blair. It was Butler who cleared the name of the cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken when charges were levelled against him by the Guardian newspaper. Instead of conducting a really thorough and diligent investigation, Butler asked a few perfunctory questions and gave Aitken a clean bill of health.

Paradoxically, it would have been better for all concerned if Butler had done a decent job. Aitken would never have gone to jail, and the Major government would have been spared a long drawn-out and damaging battle with the Press. But Butler preferred not to seek the deep and awkward truth.

Butler did not conspicuously go out of his way, either, to help Lord Justice Scott's enquiry into the arms-to-Iraq scandal. I asked him, some years after he had left office, why he did not make more of a fuss when politicians abused their position. He replied that I overestimated the powers of the Cabinet Secretary. I do not believe that Burke Trend would have given such an answer.

Regrettably, the current Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, has been in Butler's mould. Rather than lay down the law, he actually allowed himself to be drawn into being used as a factotum in the Prime Minister's political errands. When Tony Blair lacked the guts to sack Geoffrey Robinson as paymaster general, he tried to send Wilson along to carry out the task. Not surprisingly, Wilson botched it. Wilson smiled on the politicisation of Downing Street and the effective abolition of the old post of Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and his replacement by Jonathan Powell, a party-political chief of staff (though Butler bears the main responsibility for this). Wilson has permitted the doubling of the number of political advisers. At the end he realised his mistake, and called for a Civil Service Act to remedy the abuses. But that came too late.

Basically the charge against Butler and Wilson is very grave. It is that they permitted a thoroughly corrupting merger of political party and state, and a reversal of the famous Northcote/Trevelyan reforms of the mid-19th century which banished jobbery from the Civil Service. Thanks to them, it is no longer possible to tell whether Downing Street is acting in the interests of the British state or a narrow, factional, party benefit. Though both personally incorruptible, they must bear their share of the responsibility for the great scandals of the Blair administration, such as Jo Moore, Mittal and Ecclestone.

Sir Andrew, I believe that you are made of bolder stuff than Wilson or Butler. You never allowed yourself to get too close to Gordon Brown at the Treasury. You must not get too close to Tony Blair at Downing Street. You must be a man of independence and authority. Perhaps that fearlessness will cost you the peerage that customarily accompanies retirement from the job. But we will all be in your debt. I suspect that in the end Tony Blair will be the most grateful of all.

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