ABSTRACT
The civil service embodies and provides for continuity in government. When Edward Heath first entered Number 10 as Prime Minister on 19 June 1970, the civil service staff and private secretaries lined up in the entrance hall and, as is the tradition, applauded the new head of the government. Stanley Baldwin, the interwar Conservative Prime Minister, once said the machinery of government was 'a subject distasteful or dull'. Heath was fascinated by it. Although he had a high regard for the civil service, he was convinced that reform of the Whitehall machine was urgently required to make government efficient and to improve the quality of decision-making. Nicholas Ridley argued as much while the Conservatives were still in office. In a pamphlet published by the ardently free enterprise Aims of Industry in 1973, Ridley depicted Whitehall as an organised conspiracy against consensus-busting ministers. Heath seemed more interested in overhauling the machinery of government than in reforming the civil service as such.
