Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to zero. At most, you might hear the sound of a distant flute playing a courante by Lully. As Sir Howard Davies puts it in this insider’s view, which manages to be both authoritative and quite cheeky:
The Treasury does not cultivate a warm and cuddly working environment. You may well not know if your immediate boss has a spouse or partner, and would certainly never meet them if they exist. Social events are at a premium.
Yet this notoriously ascetic culture is not in the least hierarchical. Junior principals are free to slap down the arguments of the permanent secretary (Treasury officials seconded to city banks are startled by the silence of underlings in meetings there). The Treasury takes its officials from the forcing houses of Winchester and Manchester Grammar School, and in no time these intensely able recruits are making serious policy. As well as being so unexpectedly youthful, this Praetorian Guard of Whitehall is also thin on the ground. In the 1980s, I remember once asking for the names of the team supervising the nationalised industries (then a huge chunk of the British economy) and was amazed when I was directed to a single harassed under-secretary.
The Chancellors is a sequel to Davies’s earlier book The Chancellors’ Tales (2006), which included lectures given at the LSE by the five living ex-chancellors who ran the British economy between 1974 and 1997. Now he takes the story forward, drawing on his interviews with the four who were in charge for most of the period between 1997 and 2019, this time telling the story himself.
After 20 years of turmoil, the Treasury was as powerful as it was at the start
When I say this is an insider’s view, that’s an understatement.
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