What Does Jeremy Think begins with a funny anecdote of Jeremy Haywood, musing on the interviews with his wife for its composition, saying “This is all a bit Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.” Funny - because “I [Suzanne Haywood, widow and author] laughed at this...remembering when we had gone to see Tom Stoppard’s play...and Jeremy leaning over in the darkness to whisper that it made no sense as he’d never seen Shakespeare’s original.” Jeremy Haywood would have to be an extraordinarily representative man to justify, on the part of poor me, the largesse of a hardback £25, and a humiliating foray into the ‘Current Affairs’ section of the book-shop. But, if nothing else, Sir Jeremy Haywood, Baron Whitehall, is properly representative. He is a Capricorn. He was born in 1961. We are informed, with giddying lack of irony, that “the chapter titles come from Jeremy’s beloved playlist Jeremy1961 by azureseal on spotify.” His tenure in the British civil service from 1992-2017 constitutes a moral epoch in the history of mankind as distinct today as ‘The Victorians’ were in 1921.
What Does Jeremy Think is a biography of its subject by his widow compiled from interviews with him and corroboration with others who were also there. It does not therefore tell us what Jeremy thinks himself, and beyond the injunction not to slander the dead, we therefore cannot judge him by it. However this book is also intended by its author to be a defense of a public institution: the British civil service. Obviously, the career of one man will rarely allow him to impact an entire social structure. If we cannot judge Jeremy the man, or Jeremy as civil servant, what does this essay allow us to do? It is a historical document that allows us to ponder what individual qualities the British civil service selects for.
The modus operandi which defines the book is introduced very early on. In 1988, treasury economist Heywood is in… Washington “haggling over the U.K’s IMF shareholding.” Here was the problem:
“The U.K held a weak hand… because even though it was the second-largest shareholder this position wasn’t justified by its GDP...Everyone knew Britain would have to yield, the issue was whether it became the IMF’s fourth largest shareholder behind Japan and Germany… or fifth behind France.”
And here was Jeremy’s solution:
“What if we loan France enough of our IMF quota for us to share fourth place in exchange for them agreeing to Mrs Thatcher’s request to put the EBRD1 headquarters in London?”
A pragmatic compromise if there ever was one. And perhaps in this particular case it was actually necessary. Or was it…? It is never questioned in the text why British GDP is shrinking. Fair enough, a junior economist cannot be held responsible for not doing so - yet it is also never used elsewhere in the book to stress the need for growth. And what happened to that IMF shared quota? Was there ever, as I suspect, a moment in the future where Britain had to fund French interests contrary to our own because... The Agreement, Look, the agreement is crystal clear we have to share our quota. And hence the toxic problem with pragmatic compromise. When you destroy the ways of measuring information that would otherwise tell you you are doing a bad job, you have no way of making improvements; while substandard things that were initially made for pragmatism’s sake, are metamorphed by the mercy of time into achievements in themselves replacing the old measure of merit.
Slightly dark.
Like I said, I feel that in Washington D.C 1988, a pragmatic compromise was perhaps best for Britain’s interests. But as the decades wear on in the pages of Jeremy: this particular form of reasoning is applied in ever more liberal circumstances. Pragmatic compromise becomes the default way Heywood approaches any subject, even when its completely unnecessary, summarily creating an apologetics of incompetence. The admiration for the pragmatic compromise and the invocation of necessity runs very deep in Britain’s political culture. Make any kind of suggestion that the perfect sometimes can exist without the sacrifice of the good: and you will immediately be tarred with the stupidity of the idealist and the ungentlemanly love of criticism which defines the cynic. So it would be unfair to my audience if I did not provide an example of where freedom was possible. Fortunately, an episode coming shortly after this one, still in Heywood’s early tenure at the Treasury, gives me, O reader, the perfect illustration of how truly normative necessity can be.
Britain has withdrawn from the ERM following Black Wednesday, but Jeremy and the new chancellor Ken Clark are nonetheless attending an ERM meeting for reasons of bureaucratic schedule. Thus, Britain has an opportunity to witness the resolution of issues which do not affect it.
“...‘No agreement has been reached,’ Maystadt said when everyone filed back into the meeting room at 10 p.m. that evening, ‘so I propose that we suspend the ERM for a temporary, but indefinite period.’... Ken Clarke leans forward. ‘Suspending the ERM would be catastrophic,’ he said. ‘People would see it as a total political failure on the part of the community.’... The German and French finance ministers were also nodding.”
Needless to say, everybody claps, the ERM is saved and Jeremy muses that “If a similar decision had been made a year before, Black Wednesday might never have happened.” Well, quite. The implication is that had Britain forced the ERM into a posistion where it had to choose destruction or capitulation in 1992, it would’ve chosen capitulation. This possibility is never entertained by Jeremy during those pages discussing the ERM crisis, but as someone much smarter than me, he surely understood it… or did he? But it gets worse: when John Major correctly states it would’ve been politically better for the ERM to collapse now Britain is out of it, the selective determinism returns with the phrase from Jeremy that “like it or not...the ERM had survived.” Survived, seemingly, by the intervention of a British minister.
Perhaps some would conclude that the Civil Service confused the political survival of the ERM, in both cases, with Britain’s national interests, to sate their own fallible political judgements. Regardless of culpability lying in dumb ideas or dumb people, the point obtains either way that scope for agency is underrated. But bringing down the ERM is the wrong kind of pragmatism; it just isn’t a good look.
The word that booms over any discussion of the Civil Service in Britain is “impartial”; these days, nobody except the most aggressive dupe of propaganda believes this to be true. It is by now common knowledge that civil servants have ideological opinions which they act upon like elected representatives. They might not believe those opinions to be ideological, perhaps they see them as “human decency”, or justified by religions like Utilitarianism that are still allowed to influence policy in our theocratic state in dire need of lacite; but a neutral view demands we admit they are. This has led many radicals of both the Left and Right to see the unelected bureaucracy as the real ruler in Western countries. Mencius Moldbug is one of the most enthusiastic bards of ‘the men in dark suits’ who really have control. Democracy sucks, but Democracy isn’t even really what we have, elected politicians are just the placeholders for a meritocratic oligarchy.
Reading What Does Jeremy Think? You begin to grasp why this is mistaken. Unlike the Beamtenstaat of 19th century Prussia, the British civil service is allowed a selective use of The Political; when it doesn’t want to do something, it can always claim that this would not bode well for the government’s subjective, short-termist concern with public opinion. This is because Democratic Universalism does not have a conception of The Good, such as Prussia had in the individual princely estate, or the post-war Japanese concern with ‘the nation’. The democratic part of the information system, even if otherwise impotent (and the cumulative effect of this means it is not impotent), is very important in this respect of providing an excuse. Yet at other times the Civil Servant can withdraw to the purely technocratic logic of administration, talking about what is objectively right according to the logic of petty technocracy, sometimes even for ‘the country’. The conclusion is that any incompetence can be justified under the four eyes of Janus. The civil service does rule, but it rules through the selective appeal to democratic politics.
The way this is usually done is through appeal to … The Law. Dominic Cummings provides a perfect fly on the wall to witness this:
“I have witnessed the very unusual Stage 4 – the SoS sends back a message asking for a meeting with Jeremy. Jeremy arrived. ‘This is EU law so there is no basis for us to object.’ Gove: ‘Why do we get sent these stupid forms to fill out then if we can’t stop these awful things, this is going to waste hundreds of millions of pounds for nothing?’ Jeremy [a chuckle]: ‘Haha, yes, so I’ll inform the Prime Minister that you agree after all, we will mention to European officials that ministers have grave concerns, I’m sure Oliver will look at it further, goodbye Michael.’ Game Over: ‘All your base belong to us’, as the old video game said…”
Kino. And we get to see what such a process looks like from Jeremy’s end. When confronted by Steve Hilton’s attempt to introduce compensated no-fault dismissal against E.U law.
“Jeremy straightened his shoulders. ‘If you want to advise the Prime Minister to implement unlawful measures, you are welcome to do so’. He told Steve in what he hoped was his most stern voice, ‘but the civil service cannot work on them.’”
Yet it is interesting that when Jeremy has to deal with the (relevant) issue of Scottish Separatism in 2014, his reasoning is entirely political. He states that if Whitehall tries to hold a referendum without consulting the Scottish council (thus, already legitimatizing it as something which can make decisions), Salmond might call a referendum himself and order Scottish civil servants to support it. Yet this course of action would also be “illegal”, and thus Jeremy, and the rest of the civil service, would be not merely allowed, but obliged, to crush the independence movement. But this does not enter into the equation. Agency wafts onto the scene one moment, and vanishes stage left the next.
“Blair”
We see this selective determinism repeated throughout the narrative, to which we can now return. Jeremy rises to power under Tony Blair due to his treasury experience, and role as principal private secretary to the PM, allowing him to act as a go-between Downing Street and the independently-minded Chancellor. It is a role anyone would expect to make its executor indispensable. For those who still doubt the nature of this government, I found it telling that when Jeremy arrives for his interview with Blair for the position of Private Secretary, he is shocked to find it lasts a mere 10 minutes. Jeremy is then sent to Blair’s political advisor, Derry Irvine, Lord Chancellor, for the ‘real’ interview. We see the unfolding of the New Labour project. We see the publication in A.D 2000, by Jonathan Portes, of the benighted Migration Report, enshrining the still-bleated logic that immigration “benefits” the economy. We see the emergence of the Pensions Triple-Lock and infinite NHS spending under Gordon Brown, for reasons seemingly political in their entirety:
“In the first months of the new year the UK experienced a terrible outbreak of flu… the first time the Prime Minister had faced a crisis on one of his manifesto priorities… he made a bold pledge - to increase the UK’s health spending as a percentage of GDP to the EU average by 2006.” This sparks a “health arms race” with the treasury prompting Gordon Brown to “announce in his March budget a 2 billion increase in NHS spending… and a 6.1 % increase in real terms over the next four years..”
The voices of pragmatic compromise are strangely tacit on these sums where perhaps they’d be welcomed. This is incredibly odd juxtaposed with the invention, and expansion, of tuition fees, a permanent policy leitmotif throughout the book. The selective determinism is applied on tuition fees, Jeremy tells us it is inevitable because “universities need more funding.” Yet this insistence is curiously absent from the debate on pensions, with the equally factually true claim being that Britain would soon have more old people than young taxpayers. Why pensions should be triple-locked, yet free university education is unworkable, is left unclear. Jeremy says that free education amounts to a “subsidy for the middle class”, but as an egalitarian he presumably believes that education is the way in which the middle class is grown, so this is incoherent. It crosses the border from incoherent to demented when we’re reminded Jeremy also committed to increasing the number of people going to university; so the government was both simultaneously forcing people into higher education while also saddling them with debt for being middle class. That Rolls-Royce keeps trundling on. Jeremy takes a special interest in adopting ‘competition and choice’ in maternity care from his experience in a marriage where both partners work, middle class subsidies do not seem to enter the equation here, while generational ones surely do.
The cumulative effects of these policies, taken seemingly for no reason but media expediency, was that 20 years later Britain is a sceloritc, reactionary sort of place dominated by the values and money of pensioners who lord it over an army of cheap foreign labour legally privileged over the dwindling youthful natives in recompense. Whatever the propaganda about this being an ‘era of change’ and the birth of a ‘new’ ‘modern’ Britain, posterity will clearly see it as one of history’s great regressions, pathologically fearful of change. We went from being the country of Concorde to the country of faith assemblies and CCTV.
Yet, in spite of this. The book does do a good job at making you like its subject. Unlike the utilitarian bigot Gus O’Donell, Jeremy does not come across as blatantly stupid. There is something unmistakably… cozy, about his rare appearances before parliamentary committees. There’s even glimpses of a younger, Progressive Jeremy Haywood. The Jeremy Haywood who delivers a barnstorming political rant to Suzanne in his flat against inherited wealth. The 21 year old who pointed out that there was no correlation between visits by Health and Safety Inspectors and factory health standards, to the great rage of his superiors. What would’ve happened if that Jeremy submitted his claim on a prediction market and, in winning, been granted authority over the whole department to do with it as he pleased? Instead, Jeremy goes to the Treasury because that is where he will “get on” in the civil service. The progressive tendencies shine through at times; Jeremy pushes consistently for fracking. He sees the need to expand Heathrow airport, so he recommends the Prime Minister appoint an independent commission to look over ‘the facts’. (But Jeremy already knows the facts are in his favour, so why go through the extra fluff?)
Brilliant
“Independent reports” are one of the irrational things that must be resorted to when the usual channels are so slow. Here is the general picture you get of the day-to-day work of the civil service from Jeremy Think. The role of the civil service is to collect information in order to defend their judgements on what is the right course of judgement, and so corral obedience. The actual point of a civil servant like Haywood is to write papers to ministers outlining how something can best be achieved, and writing papers to the government departments resisting it to ensure that particular view gets across. But because the means of presenting and collecting information is outdated, and there is no selection mechanism in lieu of ministerial sacking to remove the ‘losing’ party, this devolves into endless Argument in which memos, media briefs, meetings, committees and communiques all take on a sacral importance in the bureaucratic calendar.
The typical life of a policy is that it is proposed by a member of the PM’s political staff, the ministry concerned claims that it is unworkable in order to maintain the status quo, a “compromise” is produced that need not have ever occurred if the people at the ministry had simply been sacked, and which defeats the point of the original policy. I am aware that bureaucracy means “rule by the office”, and is not meant to be sexy, but that seems too thin an excuse. Sometimes the civil service’s faults are admitted, but this takes strange forms. When, during the “Trojan Horse Scandal” the civil service finds it has no record of the number of mosques in the city of Birmingham, Jeremy somehow concludes this is an argument for “more diversity”. I doubt a South Asian person would have an automatic recollection of this fact either, or much appreciate being asked.
I cannot give a summary of every single government decision and failure in Jeremy Think, however one particular howler stands out. The London tube public-private partnership. Purely in order to “get The Tube, and the estimated 7 billion pounds of investment it needed… off the government’s balance sheet.”; “The solution...the Treasury devised… separated the trains frm the track. Three private sector consortia would maintain the track, handing it over each morning to London Underground so they could run the trains… it looked like a win-win.” The view from the Rolls-Royce can often be disturbing in how it makes some things “look” like. But when Blair, of all people, decides something might be up at the instigation of Ken Livingstone, Jeremy’s orders are to “find some sort of compromise with the Treasury.”
The only time the government seems to get things done is when it acts through COBR, which makes me wonder why the framework of directly giving orders to… Mayors, and police chiefs it enables can’t just be used for normal things. One of things that surprised people during the Coronavirus Reaction was the degree to which the British state relied upon the military to organize its belated response, rather than revving that Rolls Royce. In the fuel protest crisis of 2000 A.D, the book reveals the response was exactly the same. After the Home Office failed miserably to solve the crisis, Jeremy resorts to having soldiers trained to drive fuel lorries. It came close to using the same response for the London Riots of 2011. When it comes to anything that cannot be blagged off as a pragmatic compromise, when the fuel runs out and the streets are burning, it seems the British state is only capable of calling in the army. So what happens should it ever face an antagonist who has made plans to disable that army?
Heywood reaches the peak of his power under the Coalition, where essentially all of government became a repeat of the Blair-Brown equation. Here, there was no driving ideological agenda, and no acknowledged central personality; and absolutely everything could be sublimely reduced to pragmatic compromise. According to Dominic Cummings, Heywood was the true ruler of Britain during this time, his role was superficially split, but this was merely to ensure the head of the civil service reported to him instead of David Cameron. We can think of 2010-18 as the dictatorship of Sir Jeremy Heywood. Yet it is a period lacking in any distinctive crescendo of administrative achievement, good or bad, to accompany this. Heywood besieges Andrew Lansley’s healthcare reforms, he crushes Francis Maude’s attempts to reform the Civil Service (under that ever helpful chimera of “politicization”); but history eludes.
By this point in the story, in spite of myself, I wanted to like Lord Whitehall. But it's difficult, as the curt references to his actual policy contributions pile up, to avoid Cummings's accusation that in its pages he does little but preside over costly failures. He is responsible for popularizing PFI contracts. He made no plans for Brexit. He approved Hinkley Point. Jeremy Haywood was not a stupid man, but at present the public has no means of assauging sceptical claims about this beyond appeals to an institutional legitimacy Western nations can no longer take for granted. Jeremy never faces any sort of competitive judgement on his abilities; he cannot be sacked by politicians according to the ideology of our governing system, but neither does he compete against other officials. Despite the endless rage of the popular press against ‘Meritocracy’, there’s little selection or public metrics of achievement in the Civil Service. Dominic Cummings tells us many people are promoted, literally, for incompetence to get them out of the way.
The only people sacked in Jeremy Think are special advisors, when they do something ‘political’. Jeremy goes out of his way to ensure those responsible for delivering Universal Credit and HS2 are not dismissed, because they operated in difficult circumstances. Very noble, but one cannot expect an increasingly disgruntled public to see anything but the backslap behind these cases of empathy. Suzanne Heywood is understandably upset to receive a death threat in 2018 “remind your fucking husband which way the country voted”; very sad, but it is deeply alienating for those without power to see their scant chance of influencing it destroyed by processes justified purely by their own circular logic. To then be confronted by a chorus about Rolls Royces and Limousines is no longer acceptable if we want to keep calling ourselves a first world country. In supposedly despotic regimes like China and Russia, the people do not allow their apparatchiks to speak in this way.
The book ends on the tragic note of Sir Jeremy dying before what he clearly perceived as the event securing his legacy, Brexit. “The highest political stakes since Iraq...The most complex financial negotiation since the ERM...the biggest political crisis since the 2008 credit crunch.” This was to be the pragmatic compromise to end all pragmatic compromises. But instead, providence intervenes and sweeps our hero, anti-climatically, off his feet. The narrative swiftly compresses to a series of depressing hospital visits against the backdrop of Heywood manfully hanging on to his role, while his influence dwindles. Within a year Brexit would be resolved using methods opposite to his own, by executive action rather than pragmatic compromise, under the aegis of his nemesis Dominic Cummings.
Maybe you think Jeremy Heywood was incompetent, or evil, or both. But the problem is, while he might have been all of these things: he was Kino. Cardinal de la Poole crossbred with Nute Gunray. Like all representative men his motives were obscure. He was too intelligent to be in it for power, yet never betrayed anything resembling a real ideology. This book succeeded in making me like Sir Jeremy Heywood, but it did not succeed in making me like the civil service. The picture emergent from it is of an organisation that operates entirely by ritualized committees and memoranda and lunches, where purely symbolic things like Gordon Brown getting leaders at the G20 to sign a communique are heralded as impressive achievements. Sir Jeremy Heywood was what an intelligent man must be if he works in such an organisation, a fixer of broken tools.
Jacques Attali’s(, of Cofvid conspiracy screencap fame,) bank for the ‘reconstruction’ of Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism