Damocles' licence
How should one wield the sword of state?
Ostensibly, a civil servant has phenomenal power but extremely diffuse responsibility. They are responsible for designing and delivering the vast majority of government policy, but have a conveniently neutered elected politician hanging around their department ready to be ritually sacrificed as soon as their failures begin to mount up too highly. Of course, civil servants have in practice very little individual discretion over how this power is discharged. They can take no risks because they can take no decisions under their own judgement. Constitutionally, decisions must be authored by ministers; culturally, they must seek consensus, kindly. Every policy question is treated as an issue of ‘stakeholder management’, but with so many hands pulling on the levers of state, they tend to stay precisely where they are.
Every civil servant I have met has been an extremely nice person. Indeed, they cannot be anything else: their job is not to confront and over-rule, it is to scheme, to influence, and to subvert — to manipulate procedural outcomes, and to do it all nicely. You wouldn’t want to be accused of ‘bullying’ after all — that charge is reserved for ministers who forget their place. When they cover up their mistakes, they are simply operating under mandated civil service procedures — to do otherwise would be illegal. Any response or intended consequence diffuses into the whorls and eddies of the organisation’s illegible organogram. Their power is wielded in a detached, postmodern, almost ironic fashion — like trying to perform a ballet in hobnails. Everyone is responsible, so no-one is, and when something does go wrong, wouldn’t it be better if we simply put the matter behind us?
I propose the opposite: a person who has full authority and sole responsibility for their actions, and who has an intimate relationship with the power they wield. Such a person would be granted a cavalry sword as the symbol of their office, alongside a duty to keep it sharp. More than a simple symbol, it would carry, etched along one side of the blade, the details of an account at the Bank of England containing the sum of one billion pounds. This money may be spent at their sole discretion, under any circumstances they choose, on whatever projects they deem to be beneficial to the nation.
On the other side is etched a motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense, taken from the motto of the Order of the Garter, created as the first revival of the Knights of the Round Table by Edward II. There is no better code for these appointed nobles upon whom the task of national salvation will be conferred. This face represents the power of the bearer to alter or ignore secondary regulation and the dictates of any regulatory body — a power which is held by the individual and which can be extended to any organisation for which they take responsibility. Whilst still bound by primary legislation, a licensee may set their own rules within their claimed jurisdiction on any matter for which Parliament has devolved power to the Secretary of State. Shame on any who think ill of it.
The bearer of this sword is a state in miniature. After their investiture, they are simply no longer subject to the rules imposed on others: they are considered to be diplomatically immune and outside of all civil law and codes of conduct, as befits someone who is no longer a simple mortal functionary. They are not a civil servant, who carries out a mandate held by another, but a seraph of the British state, holding a mandate in their own right.
The cost of accepting this license is consenting to the Prime Minister’s judgement of their actions. Should the Prime Minister conclude they are ineffective, they may strip the licensee of their sword in disgrace. Should the Prime Minister find misconduct — without any need for a trial or any other formal process — they may order the execution of the Licensee by their own symbol of office. On the following sunrise, they are to present to a member of the Royal Household Guard with their sword, the physical representation of the responsibilities they have failed to uphold, and kneel upon the sand to speak their final words before being delivered the consequences which they have accepted.
I propose that the Prime Minister request the King, at the dawn of each summer solstice, upon the altar at the centre of Stonehenge, invests five exceptional people with such a license. As the sun rises each Licensee will kneel before their monarch, who will cut their palm with their sword as they recite their fealty, and invest them with the full powers of the British Crown and the mandate to act in the best interests of the state. I suggest Stonehenge rather than the Abbey because a forgiving God ought not condone the exercise of capital power. This is an older idea, from before God was worshipped apart from Nature. This ceremony should be a restoration of the secular glories of the state, and the Licensee should derive his powers not from God as an individual but from the nation as a citizen. An Abbey is the wrong place for such an investiture — the process should leave mud on the ermine.
This proposal is for explicitly anti-modern governance in both form and appearance, and may seem far-fetched to some readers of the Pimlico Journal. I do concede that it may serve more as inspiration than as a formal proposal of policy. Nevertheless, a willingness to explore the absurd can point us towards solutions that might not otherwise occur.
Before professional, intergenerational bureaucracies with legal personhood were developed, power had to be exercised through trusted deputies. After the fall of Rome, organisational personality became a lost social technology to Britons. Rediscovering it allowed us to build the modern world, based on consistent rule of law, as private actors could predict the actions of the state.
If individuals and organisations cannot predict the playing field in advance, they must factor that risk in making decisions: investments need to justify the endogenous risk of the projects themselves (whether a factory, an expedition, or any other venture) alongside the exogenous risk of the state changing the rules or expropriating property as it sees fit. In practice, this meant that debt was very expensive, when it was available at all.
Organisations could only trade efficiently once they were secure in the knowledge that the rules would not change underneath them. In order to provide reliable guarantees that the rules will remain unchanged for more than 10-20 years, it is essential to operate governance institutionally, rather than personally. Institutions can develop practices and make promises, borne out by their leaders and carried forward by their successors. This makes institutions intergenerationally reliable in a way that personalist governance can never be.
It is also possible to rely on an institution without personally knowing any of its officeholders — not so with an individual. Personal trust takes a lot more time to build, and people can only maintain so many active social connections — Dunbar’s number of ≈150 is commonly cited, but for the purposes of our argument it only matters that the number is somewhere in the low hundreds. A modern person interacts with the work products of millions of people at any given time, without having to form personal friendships with any one of them. A civil servant in the eighteenth century interacted with that of many thousands. A feudal king had to govern their kingdom relying only on the personal relationships they were able to maintain, limiting the scope of their government to a small number of friends and connections. Personal trust does not scale. It is not possible to build a modern state or a globalised economy on friends-of-friends; there are simply too few people in anyone’s direct network to sustain it.
Bureaucracies allow us to overcome this natural constraint on co-operation. Nevertheless, these bureaucracies have their own modes of failure, losing sight of the ends for the means and allowing the capacity to scale to become a duty. Our modern bureaucracies have eaten their own tails: they spread, unconstrained, into more and more aspects of our lives, and restrict the commerce and liberties they once enabled. We can attempt to trim the fat, or to replace them with new institutions that assume their roles — but such new structures will naturally expand and will need to be pruned in future. Equally importantly, procedures are blind to particularities and immune to judgement. Procedural institutions are therefore inflexible both in the problems they attempt to solve and the way in which they do so. Great chasms of neglect open up when challenges fail to align themselves with the enunciated responsibilities of any established institution.
The Damocles Licence is a mechanism for filling in the gaps in the institutional landscape. Licensees offer a medieval counterbalance to a modern system and are able to act with wide-ranging latitude, outside of most normal regulations and funding structures. As they are outside of these constraints, the institutions themselves do not have to be changed for Licensees to be effective. Rather than attempting to reform much of the British state everywhere and all at once, a Licensee can act as a trusted vanguard for a wholly new way of governing within a particular area of policy.
Though they must build a team to be able to interact with the existing landscape of institutions, their authority is personal. Like the medieval household clerks who acted as bureaucrats on behalf of lords, administering their lands and possessions, a Licensee’s employees are members of a household, not an institution with its own personality. They cannot go off by themselves in pursuit of their own goals, nor can they persist beyond the career of their appointer. They have no immortal, continuous authority, no institutional permanence — they are simply an extension of the capacities of the Licensee.
With such personal authority, over such a wide latitude, the standard mechanisms of institutional accountability may not apply. The role is intended to be generally set against the bureaucracies of Britain, outside of normal bounds of red tape, and not subject to the ordinary checks and balances that other state bodies abide by. We do not want to interfere with their governance, even if they do eccentric or seemingly-irrational things, because their purpose is to make bets that other bodies couldn’t or wouldn’t make, in service of the nation.
The only way that such power can be given whilst ensuring alignment with the interests of the nation to a satisfactory degree is to enforce extreme consequences for malfeasance. Licensees must be noble, and if they fail in this duty, they should be brought low. Thus, their sword is not just a metaphor, nor an indulgent aesthetic dalliance. The risks of establishing a personalist element within the state demand a sufficiently motiving punishment.
Moreover, the symbolism of state as practiced in our past was not simply a means to glorify the bearers of authority — it was also a way of imposing on those bearers the weight of their responsibility. Humans need symbols and ceremonies, even now when such things have fallen largely out of fashion. Even in our deeply rationalised times, we retain elements of symbolic practice. The most common of these is the signature — an extremely poor way to authorise or authenticate a transaction, but an extremely effective way to solemnise a transaction: before the signature, we were talking, after it is signed, we have agreed. It is a ritual that confirms a commitment, and allows all parties to promise that they have understood the agreement and intend to abide by it.
Stonehenge, the King, the sword, the giving of consent to the possibility of ones own execution: these are ceremonies that impart the seriousness of the undertaking. Outside of these symbols, the money and powers that Licensees receive are relatively minor in comparison to other state bodies. The difference is the discretion, and the possibility of genuinely autonomous and uncorrelated action it provides. Britain, unlike many other countries, retains the symbolic depth within the institutions of state to hold these kind of ceremonies which are capable of elevating an appointment to an ordainment.
Even the most ardent atheist and the most committed republican, so long as they are British, could not help but feel compelled by their monarch, the ultimate bearer of all powers of state, endowing them with such grave responsibilities on the site of our nation’s oldest sacred gatherings which hums with the memories of our ancestors. One cannot help but think that the aesthetic indistinguishability of a civil service job from any other office job is one of many reasons for the seeming inability of those who govern our country today to recognise the incomparable importance of their own success, and for the consistent acceptance of failure and mediocrity as the standard outcomes in government despite the tremendous cost they impose upon the nation. We can only hope that the re-injection of grandeur into at least some aspect of the state might serve to awaken them to the stakes.
This article was written by Ostler Wilde, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?