Published: 01 November 1999
Sir Maurice Hankey And The Origins Of The Cabinet Office
If the Treasury is Whitehall’s motor and brake, the Cabinet Office is the mirror and the vacant space at the mechanism’s heart. Like a palimsest, all the "might be’s" and "might have been’s" of the machine of government are shadowed in its surface.
The prime mover was Mr. Balfour. The Boer War and the khaki election won, he transformed the Cabinet’s decrepit Defence Committee into a "Committee of Imperial Defence (CID)", meeting regularly under himself and intended to create out of post-war military reductions a strategy defining the future roles of the Army and Navy. He meant to instal a creative mechanism at the heart of government attended only by certain Ministers and interested grandees, free of Departmental strings. There were however no arrangements for the Committee to gather intelligence or to communicate its views to those who might act on them.
This deficiency soon became apparent enough for a secretariat to be appointed (in 1904) under Sir George Clarke, a grandee bent on army reform and inclining to the Navy’s view of the Army as a home guard capable of being carried in ships and egged on to do raids. Far from being a committee clerk, he expected to exert a policy function, and eventually to make CID into a Defence Ministry.
However, by 1906 when Balfour’s Government fell, the Army were clandestinely enforcing their very different view of their role through secret discussions with the French over contingency plans for continental war. With the Admiralty and War Office on totally different tracks, and with the incoming Prime Minister taking little interest, Clarke’s schemes for policy hegemony evaporated, and in 1907 he went.
But his Secretariat carried on, largely as facilitators for useful exchanges on second order matters between such soldiers and sailors as would speak to each other or to Civil Servants. One of its five Assistant Secretaries, Captain Maurice Hankey RM, developed a genius for identifying subjects for technical discussion, as also for impressing warring grandees with his sympathetic support for their mutually incompatible views. He prudently begged them to burn his letters; many survive.
During this period, the Secretariat, in the words of its historian, "established the elements of what Hankey was to make into a religion of detachment . . . the idea of the Committee as a complement to the constitution was (his) great contribution". In other words, the perils and ambiguities in the Office’s position near the heart of power could be solved only by rigorous self effacement and a view that policy was too dangerous to be one’s business.
It is indeed difficult to squash a useful body which now you see and now you don’t. Having flitted dangerously like a moth between lamps labelled "Prime Minister’s Department", "Proto Defence Ministry" and "Think Tank", the Secretariat, led by Hankey from 1912, settled as a web of smoke-filled rooms externally lit by forked lightning, where interdepartmental subjects such as spies, medical supplies and the wartime treatment of neutral sea-captains could be diligently thrashed out.
The question of a co-ordinated war policy was laid aside. Hence when hostilities unexpectedly began in 1914, and a round table was called to consider what on earth to do, an incredulous Prime Minister was importuned by the Admirals to let them discharge the Army on the Baltic shore, while the Generals informed him that they were booked for France - and went. Meantime the Civil Service, as men sleepwalking, put into instantaneous effect the provisions of Hankey’s voluminous Warbook and the neutral sea-captains sailed in horror for foreign parts.
All these matters having been cleared up, and the Army half-scragged by a better equipped foe, the Prime Minister in November 1914 appointed a Cabinet Committee resembling the original CID, with Hankey obliging as its Secretary. Asquith had at first no intention of undermining the Cabinet’s primacy or changing its pre war habit of keeping no record. But following the gruesome inter-service confusions over the fight at Gallipoli, he set up in November 1915 a War Committee with some executive powers. Then in 1916, Lloyd George superseded this by a true War Cabinet directing total war, and so by definition, the country.
As its Secretary, Hankey directed a considerable staff of military officers, civil servants and political hangers-on serving a forest of interdepartmental committees. An acute observer described him as "a cherubic d’Artagnan with …apple cheeks … and an air of candour …. He has never said a foolish thing in his life, betrayed a secret, made a tactless remark or spoken out of turn …. (By St. Peter’s side) he will … be writing, in longhand, in an enormous book".
In fact Hankey, a Colonel and a knight at the age of 39, exerted an enormous and beneficial behind-scenes influence on war strategy, policy and even tactics; being rewarded for it when victory came by a Treasury grant equivalent in modern terms to £1 million. He waited until 1961 to publish his memoirs.
The War Cabinet’s Secretariat elided into the post-war system, but not without challenge. When in 1922 Lloyd George fell, the knife was out for the "garden room" - his coterie of political advisers, regarded in some quarters as including Hankey. "Sir Maurice Hankey’s share in the direction of the country has been distinctly unconstitutional" (Daily Mail). "The Cabinet Secretary issued orders to all Ministers" (Standard). "The too powerful and too numerous Cabinet Secretariat" (Lord Curzon). Most dangerous of all, the Treasury advanced its most powerful instrument of control, its jaws. Sir Warren Fisher tried to swallow the Cabinet Office by the head, seeking to replace Hankey with a Treasury man, and then by the tail, - to bring his staff on to the Treasury payroll.
The cherubic d’Artagnan escaped the gnash by excreting several peripheral parts and then threatening to create a stink over the Treasury’s part in national unpreparedness for war in 1914, having no doubt given careful attention to the relevant files. So Fisher failed to establish himself as "the most powerful person in Whitehall". To this day, the Hydra of Treasury Permanent Secretary and Cabinet Secretary still reigns, changing coat and shape as occasion requires. The palimsest winks on.
To find a business you can trust, click on the related categories below: