Interview: Sir Richard Mottram

“A genial, easy-going grammar school boy in his mid-‘50s,” is how former Labour minister Chris Mullin described Richard Mottram (pictured above) in his diary, on joining the department at which Mottram was permanent secretary. Ten years on, Sir Richard remains down-to-earth and refreshingly straightforward. His straightforwardness may have got him into trouble at times – more on that later – but it’s also earned him a substantial degree of respect. Professor Peter Hennessy, doyen of Whitehall-watchers, once said admiringly: “Sir Richard believes in speaking truth unto power with a directness all too rare in the upper ranks of Whitehall these days.” Few senior mandarins have his breadth of experience – he held four permanent secretary jobs – and his experiences are of more than historical interest.

The grammar school boy first entered the Ministry of Defence (MoD) after graduating from Keele University in 1968, but he dismisses the suggestion that his background was exceptional among the privileged ranks of the 1960s civil service. “I think there’s a big myth here,” Mottram says. “If you look at the senior civil service and permanent secretaries, a lot of them during that period were state-educated. Okay, they had mainly gone on to Oxford and Cambridge, but [getting into the civil service] was a highly competitive process.” Nevertheless, Mottram says that the sense of elitism surrounding the old administrative class – the predecessor to today’s fast stream – helped create a “ridiculous” class structure inside government, and one that was rightly overhauled in subsequent years.

Although Mottram betrays nostalgia for some bits of bygone Whitehall, he is also an unsentimental analyst of its weaknesses. The old elite of mandarins spent the majority of their careers working closely with ministers – including the inevitable long stints in private offices. Mottram says it’s right that people with this kind of background don’t “monopolise” the senior civil service, but adds that such career paths have advantages. “You understand the dynamic of the relationship between ministers and officials and how politics drives things.”

Politics certainly drove his time as private secretary to successive defence secretaries in the mid-1980s, a period which included both the trial of Clive Ponting, an MoD official prosecuted after leaking details of the controversial sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War; and later the Westland scandal which led to the resignation of his then-boss Michael Heseltine. Mottram ended up as a prosecution witness at the trial of his friend Ponting – something about which he has no regrets. “If someone had consulted me, I would have said: ‘Do not prosecute this person, simply dismiss them’. When we got into who would give evidence, the choice was between ministers and me. If ministers had given evidence it would have been a real circus; with my giving evidence, it was only a minor circus. It was stressful, but I was asked whether I was willing to do it and I’ve no complaints.”

Heseltine’s departure over the Westland affair deprived Mottram of a boss he describes as a model of ministerial management. The “very able, imaginative” Heseltine insisted that private secretaries stay with him throughout his time in any ministerial job, rather than using the post as a career springboard. What’s more, Mottram says, he had a singular ability to engender trust in his officials. “He had an interesting characteristic, which I’ve tried – not always successfully – to follow,” Mottram says. “When something went wrong, he would never look back, never go over it. If you made a mistake, he expected you to explain why it had happened and move on. So you had strong mutual loyalty and he always stuck to his side of the bargain.”

Some commentators feel that the strong mutual loyalty Mottram says he experienced with Heseltine was not always reciprocated by Labour ministers in the years following the 1997 election. In his evidence at the Ponting trial, Mottram made one of the frank statements for which he is best known in the public mind. “In highly charged political matters,” he told the court, “one person’s ambiguity may be another person’s truth.”

The other quote regularly associated with him was emphatically off the record, and goes to the heart of a scandal that may have cost Mottram the job of cabinet secretary. As the 2002 furore grew over press office management at the then-Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR), of which Mottram was permanent secretary, he is alleged to have told a colleague: “We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department is fucked. It’s the biggest cock-up ever. We’re all completely fucked.”

The scandal first erupted when a crass email from special adviser Jo Moore emerged: it urged civil service press officers to use September 11 as a day to “bury” uncomfortable news. The email claimed her head, and that of the department’s director of communications, Martin Sixsmith – but only after a protracted media ordeal that dragged Mottram and other officials into the public eye. The secretary of state, Stephen Byers, was also eventually forced to resign – but not before being accused of jeopardising the impartiality of the civil service and hanging officials such as Mottram out to dry in statements to the House of Commons.

“It was obviously a low point,” Mottram says. “If you are a permanent secretary, it’s not a good idea to end up on the front pages of newspapers apparently engaged in battles with your secretary of state; it’s not a good idea to have various versions of private conversations passed to a newspaper.” Stephen Byers has since, notoriously, been caught out by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme: he boasted to undercover reporters of having influenced government decisions on behalf of private sector clients, and was forced afterwards to claim that he’d exaggerated his role in a dishonest attempt to drum up lobbying business.

“What I took away from a number of incidents in which I was involved – including the whole Stephen Byers and Jo Moore thing – is that it’s really a saga about trust between civil servants and ministers and special advisers,” Mottram comments. “Telling the truth is a much more effective basis on which to build trust and a successful government than a habit of mind which is about finding approximations to the truth which seem to be convenient and useful. You could draw a lesson from that affair, and a similar lesson from the Channel 4 saga: keep it truthful and simple. I don’t think that was the habit of mind which came naturally to all the participants in the last government.”

Mottram says that he’s revisited his handling of the affair – which included his unprecedented personal statement to the press clarifying whether or not Sixsmith had been sacked – and believes he was true to his own principles. “A cautious, prudent permanent secretary might have been rather more cautious about getting involved,” he says. “There’s a sort of ‘mandarin’ style that some people would have used as the trouble really hit the fan, and their fingerprints wouldn’t have been anywhere near it – but that was never my style.”

On whether the scandal cost him the post of cabinet secretary in 2002 – he had been considered a front-runner to succeed Richard Wilson – he is uncertain. “I don’t know… probably not,” he says, but then appears to row back a little. “I think the conventional view was: ‘DETR [his department, later DTLR] hasn’t been a great success and he hasn’t been a great success as permanent secretary.’ Unsurprisingly, I would argue that neither of those things were true.”

Mottram adds that the system of selecting the country’s top bureaucrat is “insufficiently systematic” and too based on “the way in which you are seen in the system at any one time”. Of his own merits, he says frankly: “I think I would have been a perfectly credible cabinet secretary. I’d have had many good qualities, and some qualities that weren’t so good – so what?”

So, of the many jobs he did hold, which did he most enjoy? Given the many years he spent working in the MoD, he says, running the department was the “culmination” of his career – and the fact that he headed it for just three years “was a bit of a shame”. “I loved the way inside the MoD you had a combination of very, very interesting policy – about which I knew an awful lot – along with management issues and a dimension which the rest of government doesn’t always have: science and technology.” Mottram has maintained his interest in military technology since retiring, serving as chair of MoD agency the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.

The fact that this job is ongoing makes Mottram wary of venturing anything that sounds like policy prescription in the thorny area of defence expenditure, but he does say in relation to the troubled defence procurement programme that “insufficient contingency provisions were made”.

“I think history will suggest that… the Ministry was not ruthless enough in trying to keep the programme and the budget in line,” he says. But the man who oversaw the 1997-98 strategic defence review pours cold water on the notion – regularly advanced by the Tories – that the problems in MoD spending have been caused by the lack of another such review. “It isn’t strictly true that there have been no defence reviews since then; actually, in 2003-04 there were documents published which were thoughtful about how defence had evolved following 9/11.” Still, Mottram does concede that the MoD was faced with the challenge of having to fight two wars with funding still “broadly in line” with the expectations of the 1998 review.

Mottram welcomes the new government’s establishment of a National Security Council, headed by former foreign office permanent secretary Sir Peter Ricketts. “You have a very senior adviser there who has the capability to improve the coherence of the whole [national security] effort – because that’s what we need: more coherence in Whitehall and on the ground,” he says. Ricketts’ new role, he hopes, will help ensure that the forthcoming defence review improves the way that resources are distributed. “Under the present arrangements, there have been big problems in the allocation of resources for specific contingencies,” he says. “It’s often been easier to deploy military force than other forms of support, and we need to think about the right balance. The mechanisms in Whitehall and on the ground are insufficiently flexible.”

Mottram has also worked on civil service reform, having led the now-defunct Office of Public Service inside the Cabinet Office and been involved in many of the reforms of the past decade – most notably the development of Professional Skills for Government (PSG), the 2003 framework which has shaped training strategy. That initiative, along with capability reviews and the Top 200 group of senior civil servants have, he says, “absolutely improved the civil service”. And he makes a plea for the new government to retain capability reviews and the PSG agenda. “That will be quite difficult, because as resources are squeezed there will be a temptation to cut back – but the civil service needs to be upskilled,” he says.

Looking ahead, Mottram calls for a more holistic approach to government and public service reform. “There’s a habit of people doing good pieces of work which then get put on the shelf, and then somebody else comes along and does something different. That’s fine for politics, but it’s not fine for bringing about change; you need a sustained approach,” he says. “You also need a communications message which the staff can follow. Across the public service – not just the civil service – people are bombarded by initiative after initiative and they deal with that by tuning out.”

Mottram’s own most recent contribution to the reform debate came as a signatory to another initiative: the Better Government Initiative, run by a collection of learned ex-mandarins. The BGI’s report attacked ‘sofa government' and raised questions over the level of external recruitment into senior civil service jobs in recent years. But Mottram – always a mixture of traditionalism and modernity – argues that the government must retain the ability to recruit from beyond the public sector.

“There’s a lot of pressure on senior civil service numbers and salaries, and that could lead you to a point where the civil service is no longer remotely competitive in attracting the sort of mid-career people that it needs,” he warns. “There’s been very little discussion of why pay rates have risen for some of these jobs, but the answer is that the civil service has consciously and deliberately gone out and recruited the right people for the job. These reforms should be implemented in a way that is not just short-term, and leaves an organisation that is capable of running itself five, ten years in the future.”

CV highlights
1968 Joins Ministry of Defence after graduating in international relations from Keele University
1975 Moves to Cabinet Office 
1979 Becomes private secretary to MoD permanent secretary
1982 Appointed private secretary to defence secretaries, John Nott then Michael Heseltine
1986 Promoted to under-secretary of the defence programme
1989 Becomes deputy under-secretary for policy, MoD
1992 Returns to Cabinet Office as permanent secretary, Office of Public Service and Science
1995 Rejoins MoD as permanent secretary 
1998 Takes over at vast Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions
2002 Appointed permanent secretary at Department for Work and Pensions
2005 Finishes civil service career as chair of Joint Intelligence Committee
2007 Retires from government; becomes chair of Amey plc and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory