How to become a Mandarin!

Cameron has recently acquired a new Mandarin at Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue,  which in these straitened times has to be one of the most important Civil Service appointments.

 

The new CEO of HMRC was CEO of Suffolk before moving to Birmingham. She was also Returning Officer for all elections.

 

In 2005 there was the biggest-ever vote-rigging scandal regarding both the 2003 and 2004 elections which resulted in the only Election Court to have been held in the whole of 20^th Century. The judge said that ‘it would have disgraced a banana republic’. Her excuse was that she had been in strategic, not operational, control’, a piece of buck passing if ever there was.

 

She had not endeared herself to her political masters. She had been appointed by a Labour administration but control had passed to a Tory/Lib coalition. She did not endear herself by publicly expressing left-wing views when a local authority CEO should be a political eunuch. She refused to move to Birmingham, and commuted to Suffolk every week-end, and was therefore nowhere to be seen when the MG/Rover crisis broke.

 

So she had to take an early bath.

 

One would have thought that this would have been the end of a career and the occasion for a graceful early retirement on a pension of around £80,000 and a big lump sum payment.

 

But she immediately landed the job of Director General of immigration at the Home Office without having a single day’s experience in the Civil Service, and she became CEO of the new Borders Agency when this was created.

 

In this post she was criticized by the Commons Select Committee for ‘catastrophic leadership failure’, the Chairman Keith Vaz describing it as "more like the scene of a Whitehall farce than a government agency operating in the 21st century".

 

She then became Permanent Secretary at the Department of Transport. On her watch we had the West Coast Main Line fiasco, when the botched letting process is estimated to have cost £100 million.

 

It was not long before she got another blast from the Public Accounts Select Committee for an "unambitious and woefully inadequate" response to National Audit Office criticism of poor customer service at HMRC.

 

She was awarded the CB for outstanding  public service.