ABSTRACT
Though Margaret Thatcher liked, respected and trusted individual civil servants, and was by all accounts a kindly and concerned employer, she hated the civil service. This extract from her memoirs shows why. She considered public-sector employment a necessary evil and was determined to reduce its burden on the state. Civil servants were specially targeted. On Thatcher’s analysis, they did not create wealth but reduced it. They took far too long to make decisions, their training inclining them to weigh all evidence carefully. Senior civil servants were a powerful element of the establishment elite, against whom Thatcher was waging jihad anyway. They had jobs for life, dispensing lordly advice from the economic consequences of which they were invariably shielded. So attractive and responsible was the life of a senior civil servant that a disproportionate number of the ablest university-trained minds opted to apply for entry to the service rather than take their chance in the rough and tumble of commerce and private industry.
