Sir Humphrey’s new suit

A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly learning”, “career pathing”, “energy management” and — my absolute favourite — “impact residue”, which is what you leave behind when you have met someone: what the uninitiated would call a lasting impression. I was encouraged to “flex my styles” and identify “meta-objectives”. In short, I am a new man.’ In other words, he’s learned management-speak.

It’s the kind of thing that invites joyful parody from journalists, until it dawns on us how far the rot has spread: David Cameron, talking about transparency in government the other day, insisted that the government wouldn’t be setting targets, oh dear no, but ‘milestones’. And ministers are starting to talk about whether cuts are to be ‘frontloaded’ or ‘backloaded’, which means whether they’re happening sooner or later. How does a minister end up talking about snow as a ‘severe weather event’, as one did recently? It may be because that’s the sort of stuff he’s reading in his briefing papers, the jargon that his civil servants have learned to talk to him. Because that’s what has happened in Whitehall.

I’ll tell you when it came home to me that management-speak had taken over the Civil Service, at its very apex, and that was when I came across a little booklet issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the use of its staff. It was a fine example of the genre, all 14 pages of it. It was called Stakeholder Engagement and it came with the imprimatur of Peter Ricketts, the department’s permanent under-secretary, and David Miliband, then the foreign secretary.