Upon graduating from Kent with a degree in English and American Literature in 1973, Ursula Brennan applied for the Civil Service Fast Stream… and failed to get in. This was probably because, as she cheerfully admitted years later, she turned up late to the final interview.
A second tilt at the Fast Stream – after a two-year stint at the Inner London Education Authority – paid off, and Brennan’s early career was spent in the Department of Health and Social Security, the sprawling precursor to what would later be separated into the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health and Social Care.
Although the civil service as a whole was predominantly male, her cohort of fast streamers was “a large and varied intake with a substantial number of women," Brennan later recalled when speaking to the Institute for Government’s Women and Whitehall project. This led her to form an optimistic hypothesis. "I thought, 'Look at all these fast streamers – we are all probably 50/50, or not far off, men and women. In 20 years' time, that is what we will look like in more senior positions, and in 40 years' time the whole thing will be equal up to the highest levels of management.'”
It did not pan out that way. “Time alone does not do it,” she ruefully told the IfG. “You do need something more active than that."
The civil service of the 1970s was still shaped by patriarchal assumptions. Just three months into her career, a senior (male) colleague asked whether she was planning to leave – not because of her performance, but because she had recently got married. "So an extraordinary sense that, aged 22, having just started on a civil service career, three months in, I would plan to leave because I was getting married," she recalled. "He was probably 50 […] not very old, but he seemed antique."
Nevertheless it was a formative period, and one which gave rise to some rich anecdotes during a wide-ranging exit interview with this publication in 2016, a year after she retired. Over lunch with CSW, she recalled attending – as a young official – a committee meeting on the regulation of contact lenses. Mid-session, she noticed that every ophthalmologist in the room – the best in the country – was wearing spectacles. She asked the chair why. "Good heavens!" he replied. "I wouldn't put a foreign body in my eye!" This dry, observational humour frequently surfaces when Brennan talks about her career, as does a modesty about the significance of what she achieved.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, she built a varied CV. It was during a stint as secretary to the Social Security Advisory Committee that she learned a pointed lesson in the realities of civil service impartiality. Under the Thatcher government, she helped her committee produce a report arguing against cuts to housing benefit for students. The government backed down. A few years later, having been promoted, she found herself presenting the very same committee with a paper recommending the opposite. When some members asked whether she had changed her mind, she had to explain patiently that her mind had nothing to do with it.
While at DHSS, she was offered a Grade 7 job in social security, a field which back then was – as she told Civil Service Quarterly in 2015 – “considered second-class to the exciting world of health policy”. But it was a step up, and gave Brennan a chance to broaden her skills.
“Although I started on policy work, I got involved in an IT operational delivery project. I found project management very interesting so I made a conscious move into IT. At the time, everyone was saying you need a breadth of experience and [...] by 1999, I had had a career in policy, IT and operational delivery. This mix was unusual at the time and I think that helped me get my first DG role,” she told the CSQ.
More senior positions followed, including a role as chief executive of the Office for Criminal Justice Reform – a now-defunct body that promoted collaboration across the justice system. While there, Brennan found herself drawn into one of the more chaotic episodes in recent Whitehall history: the creation of the Ministry of Justice.
In 2007, home secretary John Reid had been publicly declaring his department unfit for purpose, adding new grievances to the list each time he said it. Then, one evening on television, he announced that the solution was to separate off prisons and probation into a new department. Nobody had been forewarned. "The judges knew nothing about it; I was a civil servant in what was still the Home Office at that point – none of us knew anything about it. And so then there was a frantic scramble to create the department that had just been announced," Brennan later recalled.
She served as deputy permanent secretary and director general for corporate performance at the new MoJ before moving, in October 2008, to the Ministry of Defence as its second permanent secretary. In November 2010, Brennan was appointed permanent secretary of the MoD – the first woman to hold the role. Her time in that job left a deep impression. Overseeing a department responsible for nearly 300,000 service and civilian personnel was, as she put it, "just different from anything else".
"It is huge, it has its own language [...] People are always talking about things being a life-or-death matter. Well, in the MoD, it jolly well was," she told CSW in 2016. "If you've worked in defence you can't help feeling that there is something so incredibly engaging about it. It grabs you by the vitals."
Her abiding memories from that period include trips to Afghanistan – trying to sleep in the back of a Hercules aircraft, and running from a helicopter in full body armour – and sponsoring a new safety regime that she believes made a practical difference to the lives of service personnel.
She hasn’t always had exclusively warm words for the MoD, however. Speaking at a conference on women in defence and security in 2011, she said arriving there had been "like stepping back in time, because there are no women of any seniority". When she joined the civil service in 1975, she noted there had been a "culture of bottom-pinching"; now, the sexism was more "insidious".
She didn’t mince her words about what needed to happen. The military top brass needed to make a "difficult psychological leap", she said: "They need to get on with it, and promote some women." Speaking to the Guardian after her speech she said “the world will not end" if women move up into senior military positions, adding: "They are not going to hit the nuclear trigger button by mistake."
By July 2012, Brennan was making headlines in the Guardian again – this time for being “a glutton for punishment” by moving to become perm sec of the MoJ, where she replaced Suma Chakrabarti as only the second top civil servant in the young department’s history, and its first female boss. “One of Whitehall's most senior mandarins is leaving one troubled department – and heading straight into another,” the paper declared.
Nor was her time at the helm of the justice department smooth sailing. She served under three lord chancellors – Ken Clarke, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove – during what would prove to be a period of significant controversy: legal aid cuts, prison reform, and a relentless stream of judicial reviews. As clerk of the Crown at Chancery in the same period, she accepted that politicians sometimes wanted to test legal boundaries. “That is their prerogative,” she later said to CSW, adding that some ministers took the view that “if there’s a chance we might win, I want to try.” Which made it difficult to plan, she says, “because you have to factor in that you’re doing something controversial, it’ll be judicially reviewed and then you don’t know how long the process will take”.
When asked by CSW what she saw as her greatest professional achievement, Brennan’s answer captured one of the fundamental truths of being a civil servant. Because policies and politicians come and go, she said, she had seen work she has been proud of undone by subsequent governments.
"And that's what democracy is,” she added. “In a way, what you feel most proud about are the people you've worked with. The young people you were able to help in their careers... I can think of people who were lacking in confidence and who weren't sure that they were as talented as other people. They'd probably not had the kind of education where people were constantly telling them how clever they were. And just by giving them the space, supporting them, encouraging them, you can see them develop and grow. That's been the thing that I most enjoyed."
Brennan was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath in the New Year's Honours list 2013 and retired from the civil service in July 2015, after exactly 40 years.
Just before her departure, Civil Service Quarterly asked what her retirement would look like. Her reply was characteristically unshowy: getting up later, skipping the Today Programme, going for a long walk, then sitting down to sew or embroider. "I'm a frustrated crafter," she said.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it turned out to be a bit more than that. She soon became a trustee of the National Theatre and sat on the council of the University of Kent, among other contributions to public life. Most notably, perhaps, she was appointed to the Independent Advisory Group for the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, where she brought four decades of Whitehall experience to bear on one of the most serious governance failures of recent years.
It was a fitting postscript for a public servant who championed equality and believed that change only happens when we actively push for it.
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