Conclusion

Abstract

‘It is the absolute nonentity of the British administrator that is his [sic] chief merit’, C.H. Sisson argued a generation ago.^l Is administrative biography, then, some sort of ‘memoir of a nobody’? In a normative sense it may be the case that public administration should be ‘impersonal’ because of the constitutionally-subordinate position of civil servants and the citizen’s right to equal treatment. In an organizational or historical sense there are always structural constraints and established processes which, together with events beyond their control, limit what leaders can and cannot do. In Whitehall, as elsewhere, leaders never operate in a vacuum. But to say that ‘the situation’ is important is not to deny a role for human agency and the personal factor: for individual strengths, weaknesses, aims and preoccupations.