What Does Jeremy Think?

Jeremy Heywood and the Making of Modern Britain.

Suzanne Heywood, What Does Jeremy Think? Jeremy Heywood and the making of Modern Britain, (London: William Collins, 2021).

Jeremy Heywood’s path into the civil service was more or less traditional. Independent school, Oxford, Msc at LSE, a brief stint as a health economist before the MSc before moving to the treasury where he was made Principal Private Secretary - and helped Lamont face down Black Wednesday - before the age of 30. A glittering career followed, including a well-remunerated stint in banking, advising prime ministers from Major to May, before lung cancer caught up with him in 2018. What Does Jeremy Think is the result of his widow’s conversations and post-mortem research. It’s no surprise that it veers into hagiography at times: Jeremy was almost universally loved, the prose interspersed with conversations with the great and the good lauding his talents, his colleagues singing his praises, all summed up in the eulogies given by so many past prime ministers at his memorial service. Suzanne Heywood was of course something of an insider, both in terms of sharing his life for so many decades, but also as a civil servant and consultant in her own right. These glimpses are even more fascinating. She’d spent a childhood sailing the world with her parents, suffered a head injury when their boat nearly capsized while recreating captain cook’s fateful third voyage (of course there’s a Burney connection here, Frances’ brother was on the voyage with Cook and was traumatised by the incident) before coming back to the UK where she too went through Oxford and Cambridge, emerging with a zoology PhD before joining the fast stream. There’s an anecdote that’s either sweet or disconcerting about how they first met during a job interview, jeremy the interviewer, suzanne the junior. This discordance is emblematic of the book. Jeremy’s life is polished to a sheen, the gaze firmly on him and his development, any extraneous detail stripped away. A consummate civil servant, the manuscript reviewed by the great and the good, he would have balked at the idea of a tell-all post-mortem. 

The best parts of the book unsurprisingly lay in what is not said or explained but in what is taken for granted. It’s clear Jeremy wanted to represent the best of the civil service, especially in its modernity and impartiality. Anything else would have been mortifying. But this leads to him becoming something more like a mirror to the age rather than a facilitator. Awkward moments are ignored completely, every effort is made to elide his will with that of the politicians he serves. We’re told of his brief foray into banking and how duty drove his return to the civil service - despite a much reduced salary. What’s glossed over however is that he left the civil service in not-quite disgrace, it having emerged during the enquiry into David Kelly’s suicide that he’d not minuted meetings with Blair.

It is difficult then to read the book’s subtitle ‘the making of modern Britain’ without irony. There’s very little evidence here that he thought about the work he was doing in anything other than its own terms and of its own time. There’s nothing wrong with being the excellent player of a closed-system, but it is galling to read fairly unreflective asides on the family’s wealth on the one hand and an unreflecting endorsement of third way neoliberal economics on the other. It is possible of course that Jeremy did think contextually, historically; there’s nothing to suggest he was anything other than bright. But his and his wife’s desire to be seen as the good civil servant, loyal to the queen, country, and parliament, excludes any uncomfortable reflection.

The sense we do get of his politics fit the third way mould. He was a strong supporter of Universal Credit, which apparently needed reform in order to remove ‘disincentives to work’. Meanwhile, Heywood writes how despite having a nanny the family were struggling to juggle two careers. On a trip to Morocco where he accompanied his wife to a McKinsey event, she found him schmoozing with the directors - all hanging on his every word. Market reforms were always pertinent, the civil service always having something to learn from the consulting firms that were there to welcome him back with a large salary should he get bored or blocked or fail in his civil service career. 

Similarly, by never quite resolving the question of Jeremy’s brilliance vs the Civil Service - no doubt for fear of presenting the CS as banal by comparison, it leads not to a picture of a great reformer but a man who didn’t quite understand how the service worked. During the early stages of the financial crisis, everything hinged on the oil markets. But nobody in the civil service had any clue about how they functioned. There were no specialists, no research, nothing. Only Jeremy  had a sprinkling of knowledge and initiative. The problem, as told by another civil servant privately, was that of course there were civil service teams with this expertise. Jeremy just didn’t know how to contact them or, worse, was unaware that there were dozens of analysts with decades of experience. 

Government in general is never far away from farce. Security around 9/11 was pitiful. Tony Blair asked Jeremy whether any planes were en route to Downing Street, and Jeremy had to reply that he didn’t know. He didn’t know who to ask (137), and he realised that it was quite plausible that there were no radar operators on duty that day. Yet more hours are wasted as they um and ahh whether Downing Street should be evacuated.  On a barely lighter note: during the IMF discussions through the Brown years, the Argentinian president Kirchner assaulted a poor treasure official who was guarding the meeting room door, pushing him up against a wall (260). In the middle east, Netanyahu offered a solitary bilateral meeting to the first country to reach Israel, leading to a race between English and French delegations (both with French pilots) from Sharm El-Sheik. The brits won. When he became Cabinet Secretary, a colleague strolled over to his wife and began to list all the functions she would have to arrange (355), something which she - now senior partner at McKinsey - was quick to disabuse.  But the overall effect of these incidents alongside anecdotes about how Jeremy was the sole person who thought to ask questions, to ask about timelines, to suggest quicker ways of doing things, is anything other than reassuring.

This raises questions about genre itself. Whether this is supposed to be autobiography, and or a record of grief, of a civil servant lost, an autobiography completed post-mortem, or a history of the post-Thatcherite Civil Service is never quite resolved. I suppose it makes most sense - considering what I’ve laid out above - to view this as a ghost-written autobiography, one that Jeremy and Suzanne wrote to make sense out of an anxious and industrious life cut short. This is where it succeeds: the loss of Jeremy is felt keenly by his friends and family.

If, on the other hand, we want to read it as a defence of the Modern Civil Service, then I’m not sure the picture is as flattering. Jeremy succeeded not because of the establishment he fought hard to protect, but because he knew which way the wind was blowing and how to rig the sails. His extensive contact book and eye for detail - the implication that his enquiring mind was rare in Whitehall is not exactly kind to his colleagues and is one I suspect he would disavow - were key. He blossomed in other words not because of the Civil Service but in spite of it. It’s for this reason I suspect the historical view may both find this book more interesting, and be less kind.