A Crisis of Whitehall

Abstract

The concept of crisis has been periodically applied to Whitehall since the 1970s encapsulating the decline of confidence in the UK state’s ruling institutions. The era in which UK government resembled a club, ‘whose members trusted each other to observe the spirit of the club rules’ (Marquand 1988: 178), has long ago passed into abeyance. Senior civil servants claim that the UK government, engulfed by a culture of ‘spin’ and politicisation, is in crisis (Foster 2005). Ministers vilify the mandarins, slamming Whitehall’s incompetence and failure to deliver (Blair 2010). The language of crisis is a staple of journalistic commentary on the civil service (Cameron 2009). The concept of crisis, nonetheless, is still obliquely defined. As Gamble attests, even in the theoretically informed literature, crisis ‘is thrown around fairly indiscriminately’ (2009: 7).