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The Cabinet Minister and Administration Winston S. Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–151
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
The history of the British Admiralty, like that of the War Office, furnishes an exceptionally good opportunity for reviewing the relationship which exists between a Cabinet Minister and his subordinates. This relationship, of course, presents in all departments essentially the same general features, namely, the control of a specialized group of officials by one who, though ignorant in a technical sense, nevertheless possesses unusual competence in his own field of administration and politics. But in the fighting services parts of this picture are etched with deeper and darker lines. In the first place, there is obviously a greater disparity of talent between Minister and official than occurs in most departments, and the experts seem as a rule less able, or willing, to appreciate the political implications of the demands they are constantly making. The relationship is thus apt to be more difficult and occasionally more exacerbating; but it creates by that very fact a greater need for providing the department with a sympathetic spokesman and advocate in the Cabinet, while insisting at the same time on the absolute supremacy of the political power. In the second place, the pervasive influences of bureaucracy and departmentalism, on which the Minister must wage relentless war, occur in the fighting services in an acute and aggravated form. Officials in other departments may hold narrow and circumscribed views, but their counterparts at the War Office and the Admiralty will frequently add to those a complacent and unimaginative professionalism of their own; the fondness of a civil servant for unnecessary formalism may have a military or naval parallel in ponderous methods and obsolete techniques; bureaucratic prejudice may become red-tabbed or gold-braided intolerance; an esprit de corps may be transmuted into an un-discriminating loyalty to the ship, to the battalion, or to the service.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , August 1940 , pp. 325 - 358
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1940
Footnotes
1
Cf. R. MacGregor Dawson, “The Cabinet Minister and Administration: The British War Office, 1903-16” (Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. V, Nov., 1939, pp. 451-78); also “The Cabinet Minister and Administration: Asquith, Lloyd George, Curzon” (to be published in Political Science Quarterly, Sept., 1940). This article on Mr. Churchill will be followed shortly by another dealing with the Admiralty under Balfour and Carson during the years immediately following, and will also contain a general discussion of the subject.
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