Initially working with her husband in the year prior to his death, Suzanne Heywood has written a revealing, intensely human and affectionate biography of Britain’s leading public servant. More than a rounded picture of a brilliant man, it provides insights and lessons for anyone concerned with good policy and effective administration.
Describe most work and professional activity, and people have an immediate sense of what it involves: actor, carpenter, physiotherapist, singer, flight attendant. Yet to describe someone as a ‘public servant’ (or the more pejorative ‘bureaucrat’) illuminates little.
It describes people involved in activities as diverse as planning and delivering health care for their fellow human beings, engineers assessing the costs involved in building new rail infrastructure, or economists working on the national accounts. The list goes on. The descriptor requires elaboration, and yet the cartoon image of the ageing bureaucrat, in the grey cardigan, mug in hand, waiting for the kettle to boil in the badly lit staff kitchen, dominates.
For more than 20 years Sir Jeremy Heywood was Britain’s most senior public servant. Other than for the keenest observer of public policy and administration, there is no reason for an Australian reader to have heard of him. But for anyone interested in the vital task of advising on and implementing effective public policy, his was a powerful career worth understanding and appreciating.
My time in the Downing Street Policy Directorate coincided with the years (2003-7) when Heywood stepped away from Whitehall and worked for Morgan Stanley. Of course, for that four-year period working in the city, Heywood enjoyed a greater salary and considerably shorter hours. But for him, and many others, to be an effective public servant is more than a job. It is a vocation: carrying out an essential public function to inform and influence government decision-making through professional, frank and apolitical advice.
Many of the senior and early career public servants I worked with in Whitehall already looked to Jeremy as a mentor and worked directly with him when he returned to work with Prime Minister Gordon Brown. When Heywood died in November 2018 many of them were in shock, finding it hard to believe that their most senior colleague was gone and with it the vital link between politics, ‘frank and fearless’ policy advice, political decisions and implementation.
Trusted and indispensable
Jeremy Heywood was more than trusted. His grasp of detail, depth of knowledge and understanding of the ‘hidden wiring’ of government meant he became indispensable to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and, in the two fraught Brexit dominated years prior to his early death from cancer, Theresa May.
Suzanne Heywood, a former public servant herself had long planned a biography of her husband. Thinking this would be years away following his retirement, his diagnosis and illness sadly sped the process, with the two of them working on the book together over his final year. This makes for a very particular form of intimate ‘semi-autobiography’. Written by a couple married for more than 20 years with both knowing Jeremy’s illness was likely to be terminal. Much like Tony Judt’s now classic Ill Fares the Land, the book was written in extremis with the limited number of ever more painful days giving the writing a clarity and force.
Given that the book was first written in partnership, with Suzanne Heywood only subsequently undertaking more than 200 interviews with politicians, policy academics, advocates and officials, it has a thoroughness and objectivity missing in so many (often self-serving) political autobiographies. Not quite the dry 360-degree performance review, but a rounded perspective on a career viewed and assessed by those who worked most closely with the subject.
Just five days before he died, frail and unable to walk, Jeremy Heywood was knighted in a London hospital ward as Sir Jeremy Heywood of Whitehall. It was the government buildings and departments of Whitehall – some used as far back as the Tudor period – that was his natural environment. The possibilities of British government and public policy were his life’s work.
In What Does Jeremy Think? we have a detailed, extended epitaph: a gift to all those interested in more than a history of events as seen from the inside. Each chapter and episode provides a window on the capacity, skills and understanding required to apply political intent in ways that achieve public value.
‘Apolitical’ is a much-misunderstood term. What it should refer to is not being partisan or ‘Party political’. In my experience, and as exemplified by Jeremy Heywood’s career, the very best public servants have outstanding political antenna, made all the more effective because they are not in the direct employ of their political masters.
During my two years in the Downing Street Policy Directorate half the staff of around twenty were political appointments, half were career public servants. And some of the best political advice and vital ‘quality control’ came from the public servants. They could point to the risks informed by precedent and ask the really hard questions that those more wedded to political purpose were blind to.
This is what distinguishes the very best public servants from commercial consultants and political advisers. It is a receptive, questioning yet supportive public servant who can influence government decision-making. They can build and maintain relationships with decision makers based on mutual respect and trust. And although they seek to further the interests of the current government, they are as rigorous as they are non-partisan.
Defending the value of a professionalised public service in Australia
“It may safely be asserted that, as matters now stand, the Government of the country could not be carried on without the aid of an efficient body of permanent officers, occupying a position duly subordinate to that of the Ministers who are directly responsible to the Crown and to Parliament, yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability and experience to be able to advise, assist, and to some extent, influence, those who are from time to time set over them.”
Although written more than 165 years ago, this paragraph from the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report has continued to guide how we might think and practice the work of an independent, professionalised public service able to provide dispassionate advice under the Westminster system of government.
And with this way of doing things now clearly under threat in Australia, What Does Jeremy Think? is a vital, highly relevant read. In his recent Jim Carlton Annual Integrity Lecture Glyn Davis draws attention to the importance of the current Prime Minister’s words in the foreword to Delivering for All Australians. Here Scott Morrison demotes the work of the public service to merely delivering the government’s agenda with Ministers being the ones “who provide policy leadership and direction”. What was once a partnership to govern between ministers and public service knowledge and experience is now described as a command-and-control system with the professional public service no more than the delivery arm of politically driven executive decisions.
More than text in reviews and words in speeches, the change may also be ‘writ large’ in recent decisions. Releasing a promotional video on the strength of the government response to a bushfire emergency in the middle of it, or seeing the abuse of women in the Federal Parliament as a problem to be managed with an ‘independent’ review being announced and then apparently forgotten by the Prime Minister’s own Department.
Seeing every problem as one of political communication perhaps works better in Opposition than when you have the authority and capacity to consider and take consequential decisions and implement policy in the national interest. My sense is that a richer public service culture where the current Prime Minister could take considered advice from officials with greater ‘corporate memory’ and understanding would have avoided much criticism and angst.
To be fair, and as acknowledged by Davis, the erosion of independent public service advice and capacity is not a new phenomenon. Laura Tingle’s brilliant 2015 Political Amnesia: How we forgot to govern revealed the problems to be structural with very real policy consequences.
Part of rebuilding and reasserting the importance of a professional career public service must not be nostalgia for some ‘golden age’, but through highlighting the value of a rich public service culture and public servants demonstrating the results of effective advice, government administration and policy implementation.
Tony Blair’s advice? Study Jeremy Heywood
As a colleague, Heywood was loved not feared. He valued contestability, diversity, rigorous evidence and ideas. He disliked unnecessary hierarchy and those more interested in status than content.
Exceptional though he clearly was, Heywood temperamentally and intellectually understood that collective wisdom would always trump individual brilliance. Someone working in government, in academia, business or civil society would know far more than he ever could. His job was to find them, learn, synthesise and inform policy decisions that could then be effectively implemented.
He passionately believed in open government. Open in the sense that the days where any institution, not least the public service, could believe itself the fount of all wisdom were gone. To be effective, knowledge drawn from other sources was vital to good policy advice.
His encouragement of early career public servants is legendary. When the Prime Minister or Cabinet needed to be briefed, Heywood would always involve the person actually doing the work. Generous, yes, but also more effective. Having the 20 or 30-something ‘three brained’ official (rather than her boss’s boss) there in the room both saved time communicating ‘down the hierarchy’ and was respectful of their policy work and advice.
A famous email tactic was to simply forward a message to the relevant official with the acronym ‘W-A-W-O-T?’ – Where are we on this? Sharp, to the point, but respectful of the person tasked with the job and seeking advice rather than crudely giving instruction.
And Heywood worked incredibly hard. Shooting out emails from his desk, convening meetings and leaving when he knew his presence was no longer needed. Having his BlackBerry and then his iPhone as a constant companion. In his final months, as was the case with US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Heywood would arrange for his chemo and radiotherapy to be administered on a Friday. This allowed him to feel the effects over the weekend, rest and be ready for work early on Monday.
Reading of his choice of priority made me feel a little sad for his young family. Yet Jeremy Heywood’s work and dedication to public service was what kept him going and able to be the husband, father and friend that he was. And his domestic ineptitude was legendary: he couldn’t drive, change a lightbulb or cook.
Whether it was coordinating Gordon Brown’s nationalisation of much of the UK banking system or attempting to negotiate the painful divorce of the UK’s forty-year marriage to the European Union, Heywood’s commitment to his job was complete. His ability to command the detail was immense, and his own interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence and empathy meant he could often see political and policy opportunities that no one else could.
Not only an authentic and loving way of revealing her husband’s character and professional brilliance What Does Jeremy Think? is a source for anyone who wants to understand how, when, why and by whom certain decisions were taken, and what the decision-making process within government looks like.
The back cover of the book has extracts from the speeches made at his memorial in Westminster Abbey by the four Prime Ministers that Jeremy Heywood worked with. They are effusive, generous and glowing. None of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Theresa May had to attend, but they all did, and they all spoke powerfully. I am with the words of my former boss Tony Blair: “If you’re a young person thinking of a career in public service, study Jeremy Heywood”.
A number of my former colleagues were also there. At the conclusion of proceedings, the audience made up largely of public servants, spontaneously started singing William Blake’s Jerusalem. Surely, to build a ‘new Jerusalem’ or a better society here – or anywhere else – requires more than slick political communication and ‘issue management’. It needs some of the best minds working in the public service, driven by the same professionalism and values exemplified by the career of Jeremy Heywood.
Being about British government might require you to ask your local bookshop to put it on order, but the insights in the pages of What Does Jeremy Think? speak volumes about the value of an independent professionalised public service here in Australia.
And, by parting the curtain, Suzanne Heywood has powerfully revealed just how intense, rewarding and vital the work of a trusted senior public servant can be.
Nick Rowley has taught public policy at graduate level and worked on policy in Australia, the UK and internationally. For two years between 2004 and 2006 he worked in the Downing Street Policy Directorate advising Prime Minister Tony Blair on sustainability and climate change.
What Does Jeremy Think? by Suzanne Heywood was published in Australia on 5 May 2021 by Harper Collins.