William Armstrong

Abstract

Top civil servants, William Armstrong once said, had to ‘operate on the edge of politics without being political’. It was as ‘a mandarin drawn into politics’, however, or as the Whitehall chief who ‘went public’ that he was mostly remembered after he left the civil service in 1974, largely because of his controversial role and unusual political visibility in the last embattled year or two of the Conservative government of Edward Heath. One of the outstanding figures of post-war Whitehall, with the archetypal mandarin’s consummate command of the workings of the civil service machine, he had consciously broken the mould in cultivating a public profile when appointed to head the Treasury in 1962 and more conspicuously as Head of the Civil Service handling the post-Fulton reform of the civil service after 1968. In a 1971 radio interview he had acknowledged the risks involved in civil servants ‘crossing the line’ and becoming public figures, but said that he felt that officials had to be ‘prepared to take the risk of putting our foot through the ice’. The 1972–4 period was probably the apogee of Armstrong’s influence but also the period when, overstepping the boundary between civil service and political roles, he notoriously crashed through the ‘ice’. It would be a mistake, however, to allow the controversy around William Armstrong’s role in the Heath years to overshadow his earlier achievements as one of the most brilliant Treasury officials of his generation or the huge contribution of leadership which he made to the civil service in the exacting years of change after the Fulton Report.¹