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I sometimes joke about using Yes Minister as a training manual, but I definitely read this book looking for, and finding, the template for a role model of the best of the Civil Service.
That Jeremy Heywood’s career provides a narrative that takes us from Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May illuminates so much of the context of where we are now as a nation – and yet the ever increasingly pace of politics coupled with the rupture of COVID makes yet Theresa May’s time as PM feel a fairly distance memory.
I have a feeling that most biographers are sort of in love with their subjects, how else would you bear to live with them long enough to write a book about them, but clearly Suzanne is unusual being both wife/widow and biographer. Who better to tell us about Jeremy perhaps? She is not shy about sharing the frustrations of being married to a man so totally dedicated to his job that family life seems often to have played second fiddle.
I am also left wondering if Jeremy was neurodiverse – the mix of things he seems to have done so well, and the things she tells us he was pretty useless at could fit a number of ND categories.
This is Jeremy’s account of his career, and at times the way it suggests that every good idea in the last 20+ years came to Jeremy ex nihilo did grate a little.
But overall the message that as Civil Servants we should merely be passive instruments of Ministers’ whims but proactive in formulating the change they have been elected to deliver. We are instruments of democracy when we offer up to Ministers ways of creating the better future they were elected for that they have not yet foreseen – the machine of government is so vast that we should not expect Ministers to know the right levers to pull, or even which levers exist.
It was a book that reminded me why I am proud to be a civil servant.
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