Abstract
Derek Rayner played a crucial role as an agenda-setter and ‘change-agent’ in the design and promotion of innovative managerial reforms in Whitehall after 1979, reforms which set the ball rolling for the revolutionary civil service changes which were put in place over the long period of Conservative rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Once labelled the most influential outsider to have been brought into Whitehall since the Second World War, Rayner’s impact as prime minister Thatcher’s personal adviser on efficiency was so significant that he came to have an ‘-ism’ attached to his name — ‘Raynerism’ becoming part of the vocabulary of the civil service, parliament and the media as a short-hand term for the campaign he launched to reduce waste and encourage efficiency and better management in government.1
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Notes
Marcus Sieff, Don’t Ask the Price (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 152; The Economist, 26 March 1983; Financial Times, 4 Feb. 1991.
Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989), pp. 593–4; Government Organisation for Defence Procurement and Civil Aerospace, Cmnd. 4641 (HMSO, 1971), pp. 11–12, 17–20, 22–3, 26–7, 40, 44.
Leslie Chapman, Your Disobedient Servant (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978); Hennessy, Whitehall, p. 593; private information from interviews.
Lord Rayner, The Unfinished Agenda (Stamp Memorial Lecture, University of London, 1984), p. 5.
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© 1999 Kevin Theakston
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Theakston, K. (1999). Derek Rayner. In: Leadership in Whitehall. Transforming Government. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27226-6_10
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