One of the fantastical and perverse features of modern government is its reliance on ‘consultants’.

Having created sprawling systems of such obscurity/complexity that they are unable to do anything well, civil servants and Ministers then call in consultants to try to sort things (and themselves) out.

The FCO has reeled under the recommendations of successive big-picture consultancies. Many years ago in what was portrayed as a wonderful modern innovation, the then Coopers and Lybrand were paid to look at the FCO’s personnel policy.

They concluded that not enough was being done to nurture the careers of individuals. So a new system was proposed. Each officer would have access to a personnel officer tasked with advising on his/her career, separate from the system of getting FCO bottoms on FCO seats round the world.

This created a proliferation of bureaucracy and made setting up coherent postings-chains ("Here’s a plan – let’s send X there, put Y in X’s place and move Z to where Y is") next to impossible. Over the years the system grew and grew in ever-more insane forms until several hundred people were involved in the postings apparatus.

Then it all crashed under the weight of its own stupidity and in effect the FCO gave up on a centralised personnel policy altogether, in favour of a sort of free market. Now (more or less) jobs are advertised as they come up, people bid for them and the line managers of the job concerned decide who they’ll take. 

This system has its attractions (melancholy fun weeding out applicants for jobs who can not even be bothered to write their job-bids sensibly or without spelling errors, even though you know that they’ll end up somewhere else in the FCO where standards are declining). But it sits uneasily with what arguably the public might be expecting, namely getting the best people in the jobs which really matter. That would be peremptory and judgemental and even elitist, and lots of other horrid things.

And in any case at the highest level the whole thing is in effect ignored. Chains of top jobs are dealt with as a whole in a mysterious and untransparent way, as they always have been and always will be.

Meanwhile other consultants creep into the building, in the form of ‘executive coaches’ for top bureaucrats, and actors getting paid to help FCO officials boost their confidence or somesuch. Outside fire-prevention experts arrive at Embassies and spend a week laboriously doing checks and surveys and writing them up, tasks which the Embassy management team should do in a couple of hours.

Multiply all this across government and you get consultancy budgets far out of control or reason. 

Where does all this madness come from?

Matthew Stewart has a clear view: a fixation on an abstract idea of efficiency, going back many decades now:

Consulting “contributes to a ­misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity, leading us to neglect the social, moral, and political ­infrastructure on which our well-being depends.” … the profession is built on a science of management that is both narrow-minded and ­intellectually bogus. In its pursuit of single goals, such as efficiency, it ignores the broader purpose of ­business.

One of the most dishonest parts of the management consultancy racket is its endless quest to find problems and make new recommendations.

In soap operas it’s called plot recycling. The couple fall in love, get married, start messing around with other people, split up, realise the error of their ways, get back together again, start straying again, and so on. It is not allowed to stop.

It has to be this way; consultants put themselves out of business if they say that on the whole things are about as good as might be expected, and that the hassle of change will be more than the likely value of change.

Too centralised? Decentralise!

Too decentralised? Centralise! 

In all my long FCO career I never saw a single consultancy report which attempted to look not only at the weaknesses but also at the strengths of the status quo, plus the strengths and likely weaknesses of the new proposals, and the transaction costs of moving from one state to another.

Instead they all fretted over the alleged weaknesses of the current situation and the wonders breezily coming our way when their recommendations were adopted.

Or instead another force is at work. Ministries pay lavishly for putside recommendations. But the more businesslike and radical the recommendations are, the more likely they are to be embarrassing and ignored.

What a farce all this is.

Will a new British government have the nerve to issue an edict on Day One to cancel all consultancy contracts at a stroke and have a freeze on new ones for a couple of years, while government takes a hard private look at itself?

Somehow I doubt it.