Centrism and the mandarin class: Understanding the meta-politics of Whitehall bureaucratic neutrality

Abstract

The role of permanent secretary represents the apogee of a career in the Whitehall bureaucracy. Even so it is under-researched and, with exceptions, notably Dunleavy et al. on bureau shaping, under-theorised. Emanating from a longitudinal survey of eight successive permanent secretaries at the Ministry of Education from 1976 to 2011, this paper identifies them as members of a meta-political class who, whilst influencing the policy decisions of politicians, are nonetheless not members of the political class. A model locating them across a spectrum of six related yet distinct genres of ‘centrism’, and a continuum of five contingent descriptive styles is used to illustrate and interpret their praxis.