Whitehall brief

'Mr Clean can veto improper appointments

* By Peter Hennessy

In career terms Mr Dennis Trevelyan has gone from one extreme to another. For. five years his job was to keep people in, 45,000 of them to be precise, the residents of HM Prisons in England and Wales. Three weeks ago he became First Civil Service Comnmissioner responsible to the Queen and the Privy Council for keeping unqualified, politically appointed persons out of Whitehall.

Although only a deputy secretary in the Management and Personnel Office, he can, technically, go over the heads of his boss, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Robert's boss, the Prime Minister, and protest to the sovereign if he believes patronage of the' early nineteenth century variety is once more rearing its corrupt head.

His singular power derives from successive orders in council, the first of 1855 vintage, the most recent a 1982 formulation. It was a distant ancestor, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who, with Sir Stafford Northcote produced the famous repoit of 1853 which recommended that the Civil Service be cleaned up through a system of appointments based purely on merit as demonstrated in competitive examination.

The job of the 1983 model Trevelyan is to make sure that Whitehall stays clean. Nobody can take up a permanent post in the executive grades or higher

Mr Dennis Trevelyan: Holds the trump cards.

without a certificate from him demonstrating that they have been properly recruited.

The matter is less arcane than it sounds. There are individuals and groups in both the Conservative and Labour parties who are calling for the upper reaches of the policy-making Civil Service to be partially politicized by the importation of some politically committed outsiders into the top three ranks of the hierarchy. -

The 1982 order, which was promulgated from Buckingham

Palace on December 22, does contain a passage which should allow a future prime minister sufficient leeway to recruit sympathetic outsiders on a temnporary basis without precipitating a constitutional crisis.

Section 1 (2) (c) states that Mr Trevelyan's certificate will not be needed "in respect of appointments such that the period for which the situation is said fo be held thereunder by the person appointed terminates at -the end of an administration".

Matters ctuld get tricky, however, if heads of Whitehall departments" wbre appointed from partisan outsiders. Almost by definition that kind of permanent secretary could not be a temporary brought in under Section 1 (2) (c), although some permanent secretaries, such as Professor Terrence Burnis, Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury, are temporary civil servants.

What could Mr Trevelyan do if the nineteenth-century settlementi the brainchild of his ancesfo.- seerned under- threat? The pattern of escalation would probably proceed as follows.

First hle. would confide his fears to Sir Robert Armstrong. Depending on. the level at which the "improper" appointment was to take place, he would talk to the minister and the permanent secretary...