CONSTITUTIONS provide mechanisms for controlling, limiting and directing state power. They divide powers between levels of government. They protect fundamental rights that have to be safeguarded even in times of crisis. They define the procedures and institutions by which leaders are held accountable.

Before they can do that, however, constitutions also have to create legitimate public authority. They con-stitute (“put together”) the state. That power has to be generated before it can be controlled, limited and directed. It is generated by creating agreed constitutional rules about how governments are chosen, such that even those who are disappointed in an electoral outcome are nevertheless satisfied with the legitimacy of the process. Even if we voted for the other side, we can have confidence that the winner won fair and square under rules that we accept as valid.

To make that procedural legitimacy effective, people must also have confidence in the basic decency and good intentions of those who govern in our name. We might not agree with them on policy. We might have other priorities. We might not particularly like them as individuals. We certainly do not expect them to get everything right.

We do, however, expect them to work sincerely and with good faith on our behalf, to take their responsibilities seriously, and to do their best according to the light that is given to them. We need to know – and we need to know that they know – that they are not there for fun, or fame, or fortune, but to be faithful stewards of the public good on our behalf.

This applies to those in political leadership – to prime ministers, first ministers and the like – but it also applies to those who support and advise them, and who carry out their decisions: the civil servants.

In the mid-19th century, there was no such confidence in the administration. Most elements of public administration and service delivery – such as it was – were privatised. Private finance initatives (they did not call them that, but it was the same principle) supplied the state with much of its capital for instructure development – turnpike roads and canals. Public offices were distributed by political patronage, or sometimes – as in the case of army commissions – by outright purchase. Profitable offices were farmed out to underpaid deputies, while the nominal appointee took the revenues in return for voting the right way.

The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 identified the rot at the heart of this “Old Corruption”, as the previous system of patronage and privatisation was known, and proposed instead the creation of a permanent, professional, non-partisan civil service.

The reforms that followed were one of the truly great achievements of the Victorian British-imperial state. The development of a competent, efficient and trustworthy civil service enabled the modernising and democratising British state to take on vast new responsibilities – from inspecting factories and clearing slums to winning world wars and running a National Health Service.

It was recognised that without a cadre of well educated, well trained, well led and well motivated professional administrators, willing to lay aside their partisan concerns and to work diligently behind the scenes for the duly elected Government, even the best democracy is all talk and no action. Someone has to do the planning, the marshalling, the organising, the stock control, the accounts.

When former British colonies became independent after the Second World War, most sought to establish written constitutions that would replicate, in ways appropriate to their context, the best features of the Westminster Model of democracy – the reputation of which, at the time, was riding high. These constitutions invariably contained long chapters on the civil service and established Public Service Commissions to shield appointments from political control.

The Scottish Government’s 2014 draft constitution – although lacking in detail found in other constitutions – at least recognised the principles of civil service impartiality.

Unfortunately, the UK has no such constitutional protections. Its historical achievements are always vulnerable to being swept away. From Thatcher onwards the civil service has been steadily eroded. Career civil servants at senior levels have increasingly been replaced by political spin doctors, and by appointees brought in from business, financial consultancy, or public relations. The values that once made the civil service what it was – its public service ethos, its neutrality – have increasingly had to give way to market-orientated motives.

The result is a devastating loss of what international development theorists call “governance capacity”: the ability of the state to get things done. The “implementation gap” between promise and delivery has never been greater. This is painfully – and for some fatally – apparent when it comes to the UK Government’s response to coronavirus. Officially, piss-ups are banned, and breweries are off-limits, but you get the idea.

How many hospitals? How many nurses? How many ventilators? Where? When? With questions of life and death such as these at stake, we need fewer bluffing Borises and more bureaucratic boffins.

This Column welcomes questions from readers

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