Another day, another select committee on the Mandelson scandal. Witness in the box this time was Catherine ‘Cat’ Little, ‘chief operating officer’ of the Civil Service. She is the Cabinet Office’s Sir Humphrey, forever in and out of the PM’s lair.
How was she, this doyenne of our administrative elite? Urbane? Open? No. She was as cold as a clenched mollusc. The committee would have had a more profitable time visiting a Pembrokeshire rockpool and interviewing a limpet.
The Mandelson affair, ruinous for Sir Keir Starmer, is also doing terrible harm to Whitehall. For the second time this week we had a member of the mandarinate tiptoeing around questions, cagey, non-committal, aghast at the vulgarity of public scrutiny.
Her entire persona radiated inertia. Procedure was her buddha. She was obsessed by note-taking, audit trails and political blame. Fiefdoms and legal advice. Portals. Documents. Thousands and thousands of documents.
Ms Little, 45, sat alone at the witness table. She was slim, weirdly motionless, often the only movement being the darting of her eyes. It was obvious she was as tense as catgut. Miserable, too. Careerism does that to you. Whitehall is a game of chess in which the pieces are live scorpions.
Why does anyone go into the civil service? We non-Hindus are given only one life. To spend it suppressing one’s curiosity, hoping not to be told things, keeping things ‘tight’, must be horrible.
Cat Little’s entire persona radiated inertia. Procedure was her buddha. She was obsessed by note-taking, audit trails and political blame, writes Quentin Letts
The appointment of Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador has been as ruinous for Whitehall as it has been for Sir Keir Starmer, says Quentin Letts
Ms Little kept nodding her head at the end of answers, a normally affirmative gesture that was here being used negatively. Those nods screamed: ‘I don’t want to say any more – STOP TORTURING ME.’ Terror of saying something interesting. Life lived in a crouching cringe: that’s what Whitehall offers.
At the start of the hearing her voice had the sing-song patronising quality of a kindergarten nanny: little licks of uplift, babyish consonants, diphthong vowels, not least when she began sentences with ‘so’. As the meeting continued this yielded to something duller and slower. By the end she sounded as if she had been drugged.
She was asked about Sir Keir’s row with former Foreign Office chief Sir Olly Robbins. On some things she backed the PM, on others Sir Olly. The most interesting moment that I could discern came when she disclosed, with touching puzzlement, that no written minute seemed to have been taken of the decision to send Lord Mandelson to Washington DC. Well, fancy that.
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You needed to be alert in the slips to catch such moments. The rest of it was foggy with bureaucratese. ‘I cannot comment,’ she said some 20 times. She spoke of judgment processes and decision-making authorities, departmental protocols and legal policy propriety advice. You may find such words in a pocket dictionary but when uttered by a fluent jargoniste such as Ms Little they acquire a prophylactic shield and comprehension bounces off them. She made normal English terms no more comprehensible than an up-country dialect of Wolof.
There were iterative processes for information gathering. Policy frameworks. Ethics and propriety teams. She prosaically described the Cabinet Secretary as her line manager. The first instinct, time and again, was to be as lifeless and multi-syllabic as possible. When she wished to evade a question she said, ‘perhaps it would be helpful if I laid out the context…’ Perhaps it would be helpful is what every corporate waffler says when trying to change the subject.
The kind-hearted among you will say ‘these are unusual matters – the poor woman was obviously just protecting her backside’. Sorry. I have seen Ms Little in previous select committees, right back to when she ran the money at the Ministry of Defence. Look how things went there. She has always been opaque. Maybe that is why she has risen so high. The new Cabinet Secretary, Dame Antonia Romeo, must be delighted to have such a limited deputy.
No wonder nothing gets done. And no wonder political operators such as Morgan McSweeney end up swearing at these people. Wouldn’t you?
