ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the historical conditions of possibility of Gordon Brown’s scheme for the government of civil servants. It highlights the role of an array of collective and individual political actors and disparate governing authorities, beyond the formal political domain, in the emergence of a particular scheme of rule. The chapter considers the ideas and practices at stake and the role of an alliance of forces in the emergence of the scheme for codifying bureaucratic ethics. It explores the contribution of civil servants seeking to uphold customary ways during Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministership, Liberals, Social Democrats, think tanks and pressure groups advancing critiques of the vagaries of the British Constitution and Civil Service organization, alongside sympathetic elements in the Labour Party. By the later 1980s arguments for the reform of the government of civil servants were being subsumed in broader programmes of rule.
