Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  By contrast, I was made to be a civil servant – I was a card-carrying member of the closed shop. I came from a good school in an affluent area, I got on with people easily when not playing football against them, and – when it came to proving I was a confident, rounded personality and good at most academic disciplines – I’d just had four years of intense training at Cambridge.

  These days, the entrance tests for Fast Stream applications are all completed online, but back in 1996, aspiring civil servants at Cambridge had to troop to a large community centre on an estate miles outside the city to take the tests exam-hall style.

  My good friend Chris Spink, doing a Master’s on the social history of golf, drove us out to the community centre. After I failed even to complete the numerical reasoning test in the morning, I’d pretty much given up. So while Chris and the other students sat studying the sample questions for the afternoon tests, I went to the pub on the estate and had a pint.

  If I’d had more cash on me, I probably would have stayed, but faced with the prospect of nursing one more pint for two hours while I waited for my lift back from Chris, I decided to go back to the exam hall. Perhaps liberated by the drink, I did far better in the afternoon tests and, a few weeks later, I was invited to London for the Civil Service Selection Board (CSSB), a day of individual tests and group exercises with fellow candidates.

  Frankly, CSSB was a piece of cake. There was an interview, an in-tray exercise, a written exercise and a group exercise, where five of us played at being a town hall committee deciding how best to invest money in a local park.

  There are only two rules in a civil service role-play group exercise. First, get stuck in; some people feel so embarrassed at the artificiality of it that they just freeze. Second, be the anti-dick. There’s always one dick and, once they identify themselves, you just need to say and do the exact opposite of everything the dick says and does. He says: ‘I’m not sure that idea really works, Caroline’; you say: ‘Actually, I really wanted to hear more about it, Caroline.’

  The final test was an interview with a psychiatrist, designed to test whether I was an egomaniac, liar or potential security risk. All I know is I passed. I went to the Lord Moon pub on Whitehall at the end, absolutely confident that I was through to the next round, and now beginning to accept the reality that – if I didn’t get funding to continue my PhD on rioting – this might be the best option for me.

  That next round, a few weeks on, was called the Final Selection Board, and we were told in advance that no preparation would be either necessary or helpful, except for keeping abreast of current affairs.

  I was escorted into a large wood-panelled room in Whitehall, where fifteen po-faced, middle-aged senior civil servants – mostly men, all but one white – were sat in a horseshoe around a single chair. I took that seat and, with no welcomes or niceties, the chairman launched in: ‘What considerations do you think the government makes when formulating its policies on shipping?’

  ‘Shipping,’ I began emphatically. ‘Well let’s first um … think about what um … policy areas we’d be talking about … and then we can think about um … the considerations.’ Fifteen pairs of eyes were boring into me. ‘Um … well there’s shipping safety … the ship-building industry of course. Um … then shipping ports and their economies… Um … military ships… Um, shipping waters, including um … erm … issues around shipping lanes.’

  It was like an episode of Family Fortunes scripted by Harold Pinter. ‘Are those the kind of policy areas you had in mind?’ I asked. The chairman replied icily: ‘Some of the things you have mentioned are some of the aspects of policy on shipping. Please go on.’

  I continued waffling in a hesitant and deeply unimpressive way, even more so at all the follow-up questions from those sitting round the room. The reason I know I was deeply unimpressive was that I happened across my personnel file later in my career, and the verdict from the board was: ‘We found this candidate deeply unimpressive.’

  They went on to say that – given my very high rating from the CSSB panel – they could only assume I’d been affected by nerves, but ‘that does not entirely explain his total lack of understanding of basic concepts and issues’. They concluded that they did not wish to overturn the CSSB verdict entirely, but I should be considered a very low-ranked entrant to the Fast Stream scheme.

  So, there it was. At no point in that whole Fast Stream recruitment process were my violent competitive streak, excess drinking, duplicitous instincts, preference for football over work, fervent Irish nationalism or even my rampant homogeneity with every other person on the scheme exposed as potentially good reasons not to appoint me. But, by God, they nearly found me out for my ignorance on shipping.

  Given my low ranking from the Final Selection Board, it was no surprise to get a letter telling me that I’d been appointed to HM Customs & Excise, which usually only had two Fast Stream recruits per year and was considered – rather unfairly – a bit of a backwater when it came to the importance and influence of different civil service departments.

  The good thing was that any Fast Streamer who ended up there had a good chance to make their mark, and some of the best civil servants I worked alongside in my entire career – Paul Gerrard, Heidi Popperwell, Andy Leggett, Sue Connaughton and Rebecca Hall to name a few – all came in through that route.

  Perhaps the pick of the bunch was a young economist named Rita Patel, who went on to be a high flier in the Treasury and the Department of Culture, and became a Whitehall legend on her first day working in Gordon Brown’s private office.

  In front of a large gathering of external businesspeople, he introduced her as ‘Ruth’. She’d been warned he was bad with names and had to be corrected early, so shouted at him: ‘It’s Rita, Chancellor, RITA!’ I’d like to say that he coolly replied: ‘OK, Rita, but it’s not Chancellor, it’s Gordon’, but I think he was too taken aback. He never got her name wrong again though.

  I always blamed Gordon’s religious upbringing. He was fine with any names that were in the Bible, but if he was told any that weren’t, he would immediately resort to the closest Biblical equivalent. This came to a head in 2006 when he was introduced to his new private secretary, Jean-Christophe Gray. There was no way Gordon could manage that, so he became the Biblical abbreviation J-C instead, and is still known by that name in his current role as David Cameron’s official spokesman.

  Anyway, back in 1996, I was told to report to Ms Diana Barrett at Customs HQ in Blackfriars on 30 September. I spent that summer working in the stock room at Argos in Hendon, all the while thinking: ‘How on earth have I ended up a civil servant?’ In retrospect, it was stamped on my forehead from the moment I presented my first pub quiz at Cambridge.

  Is there any way this closed shop on Fast Stream recruitment could be changed? There are some simple things that could be done immediately. For example, it should not be existing civil servants assessing future civil servants; that just reinforces the tendency for the organisation to recruit in its own image.

  However, to really break open the system, I would – even just for one experimental year – do something entirely different.

  Instead of all the criteria, numeracy tests, group role-play and psychological profiling, I would open the competition to any young person in the country who wants to join the Fast Stream scheme, regardless of their qualifications. I’d invite them – whether in writing, by film or down a phone line – to submit an idea, in as much detail as they can, for one practical thing they would do to change the country or their community for the better.

  Of course there would be thousands of crazy, uncosted, undeliverable ideas, doubtless many of them from students with good degrees, and lots of submissions revealing political bias, prejudice or psychosis. But there would also be hundreds of sensible, imaginative and transformative proposals, and the young people who’d submitted them could then be invited to come and present their ideas to each other, and have genuine discussions about which would work bes
t.

  The civil service could then simply choose those individuals who came across on the day as the most intelligent, thoughtful, nice and genuine people.

  It would put creativity, thoughtfulness and common sense at the heart of Fast Stream recruitment for at least one year.

  4

  CUSTOMS AS I AM

  ‘I want to work in an office with my own desk.’

  When I was nine years old, at St Theresa’s primary school in Finchley, our teacher Sister Eucharia – a fearsome nun who had given me and my friend Tim a memorable thrashing for crying about the death of John Lennon three years previously – went round the class asking us what we wanted to do when we grew up.

  For all the firemen, astronauts, nurses and soldiers in the room, I was clear: I wanted to be an office worker. And not any old office. I wanted to work in the gigantic IPC Magazines building in Southwark where, that past summer, our ‘Uncle’ Tom had taken me, my dad and my brothers round the offices where he worked as an advertising draughtsman.

  He took us to the floor where Roy of the Rovers was created, showed us the amazing view and invited us to choose a photo from their collection. I broke my dad’s heart by choosing Arsenal’s young midfield maestro Paul Davis ahead of Celtic’s Paul McStay.

  That aside, it was the happiest day of my young life: free hot chocolate; whatever we wanted for lunch from the canteen; men in swishy suits laughing with women in shiny blouses; and everywhere you looked, people drawing and writing at their desks, just like I did in my tiny room at home.

  I’d forgotten most of that day until I turned up for work at Customs fourteen years later, walked across Blackfriars Bridge, and realised that New Kings Beam House – where I was going to be based – backed onto the IPC building. I took this as a tremendous omen, and from the moment I was taken round the building and saw the giant glass corner offices overlooking the river where the directors and chairwoman sat, I knew this was where I wanted to spend the rest of my working life.

  The wind was rather taken out of my sails when I sat down with my new boss and was told what to expect in terms of career progression. Diana was the tough and experienced head of the Customs anti-smuggling division, responsible for policy on the illegal trade in drugs, pornography, alcohol, tobacco, fuel and endangered species, and helping to coordinate major operations across the different Customs regions, as well as joint operations with the police or our international colleagues.

  She explained that I’d work about four or five years in different Fast Stream posts, with modest annual increases in my starting salary (£16k). Then, if I was ready, I’d go to an assessment centre to be considered for promotion to a Grade 7 manager’s position (£40k), do seven or eight years at that level, and then start applying for jobs at a senior civil service role at Grade 5 (£60k), but without expecting to get one in a hurry.

  After that… well, Diana herself was still waiting for promotion beyond that level, so she wasn’t going to hold out the prospect for me. But those glass corner offices overlooking the river for the Grade 3 directors suddenly looked very far away. As it was, and entirely because of my eventual wheeze of twice zigging over sideways to the Treasury, then zagging back to Customs on promotion, I ended up becoming the youngest ever Customs senior civil servant just over six years later, at the age of twenty-eight.

  But I packed more experiences and education into that first year, working across the full range of anti-smuggling policies and operations, than I did in any other civil service post. Less than a year out of university, without any formal training or indeed rigorous background security checks, I was helping Dutch customs staff in Rotterdam search banana boats from Colombia for shipments of cocaine, and sitting in on planning sessions with the RUC and the security services for a major crackdown on IRA smuggling operations.

  With a colleague named Bob Pennington, I was sent round Britain’s container ports to investigate a rash of large seizures of cigarettes, as a result of which we wrote the first official report revealing that tobacco-smuggling was no longer about blokes in overloaded white vans at Dover, or teenagers with bulging suitcases on flights back from Tenerife; it was a massive organised crime operation with millions of tax-free ‘exported’ cigarettes returning to Britain every day by the ship-load.

  It was like a giant great adventure holiday. And, as with any holiday, there were fascinating discoveries too. Go round the back of the luggage carousels at airports and you’d find anti-smuggling staff … ahem … taking a peek (and breaking the odd padlock to do so) inside the bags of passengers who’d been identified as suspect to see whether there was indeed a good reason to stop them.

  What made someone suspect? One more bag than they went out with; an almost empty bag when they went out which was now full; or travelling back with different people than they’d travelled out with. All things that could simply be told by comparing the passport and check-in information at either end.

  But most of all, we’d receive intelligence on likely suspects: informants within gangs; people we’d nicked, trying to get an easy ride by giving up their fellow smugglers on other flights; handlers who’d already been identified and picked up in the arrivals area doing likewise.

  Now, if an informant has identified a suspect, and their bag has been checked behind the carousel, how do you arrest them without giving both games away? No experienced smuggler will believe they were pulled over at random. Simple: smear the bag with some invisible canine catnip, put one of the ‘drug dogs’ in the exit hall and let them go nuts when they smell it. The smuggler thinks he got unlucky with Britain’s best bloodhound and the informant can continue his or her work.

  Another fascinating – or disturbing – discovery came at the unit at the Mount Pleasant sorting office responsible for checking parcels. Mainly they were looking for drugs, but in the days before the explosion of internet porn they were also looking for video cassettes and magazines containing indecent or obscene material.

  Finding anything like that was very, very rare, but nevertheless, if you discovered a home-made or imported pornographic video in a parcel, you had to watch or slow-wind through the whole tape to check that – at some stage – it didn’t turn into something illegal. ‘Better pause it, Bob, that Alsatian’s looking frisky.’ The same was true with magazines and collections of photos on discs.

  So it was that a couple of Customs officers had to spend all day watching entirely legal pornographic films and slideshows, looking for a needle in a haystack, so to speak. It was felt that work was best done in pairs, for what I hope are obvious reasons; and usually not by a mixed couple, ditto.

  It was also felt that you couldn’t expect someone to do that work every day for too long without becoming a bit jaded, so anti-smuggling staff from around the country were invited to apply for rotations in the Mount Pleasant porn section just to maintain a healthy level of turnover. This did of course bring its own problems, when one or two people started requesting a rotation rather more often and enthusiastically than appropriate.

  But if there were one or two bad apples and dodgy practices in the Customs world, as in any walk of life, the vast majority of people I worked with in my first job were entirely good eggs, committed to their work until Friday lunchtime, when the office would empty into one of the nearby pubs and rub shoulders with the swishy suits and shiny blouses from the IPC building.

  As well as the week ending at midday on Friday, I also got Wednesday afternoons off to represent Customs HQ at football against the other big Customs bases, playing matches on freezing hilltops in Dover or plush pitches near Heathrow. Despite playing with the torn cruciate ligaments I’d been nursing since my last year at Peterhouse, it was the best standard and most enjoyable football of my life. I also learned you don’t rampage around starting fights with sixteen-stone Customs officers.

  I never talked politics with my colleagues or teammates, and I didn’t discover any of their affiliations until the day after the 1997 election, when I limped across Blackfr
iars Bridge around 11 a.m., hugely hungover after a night of celebrating Labour’s victory and staying up to watch Tony Blair’s majority mount up. I was astonished to see the entire riverside area outside the Doggett’s Coat and Badge pub brimming with people from the Customs office, including all of my team.

  I thought they were all out celebrating and went down the steps to join them, but – while there was plenty of drinking going on – the atmosphere was sour.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked one of the Grade 7s in the team: ‘We’ve walked out.’ He gestured angrily down the river towards Westminster. ‘We’re not working for that bloody woman’, by whom he meant Dawn Primarolo, the incoming Customs minister, who’d made herself unpopular with the hard-bitten Customs lads, largely on account of being a woman.

  Despite the odd political and attitudinal difference, I felt thoroughly sad when I was transferred from the anti-smuggling team to work on a new review into the taxation of charities, set up by Gordon Brown in his July 1997 Budget speech. It was led by the Inland Revenue, but our little Customs project team was supposed to mop up any issues raised about VAT or other indirect taxes. We sat for months just compiling and analysing responses from charities all over the country.

  It was an education in how best to perform political lobbying. We’d receive thirty- or forty-page submissions from major charity associations or accountancy firms detailing incredibly complex or impossibly expensive proposed changes to tax law, which had no chance of going through. And we’d receive hundreds or thousands of identikit postcards, petitions or emails, which – while impressive in terms of sheer numbers – didn’t have any emotional punch.

  Much more effective were the sheer numbers of elderly people persuaded by religious charities to write by shaking hand to campaign for VAT relief on repairs to their local churches. Never the same letter twice; most of them tear-jerking. They might have wondered if it was a waste of a stamp, given they were just compiled and processed by some kid like me, but when I got the chance to push through a special VAT refund scheme for church repairs in 2001, those letters were what was in my mind.