Legends from the civil service
I declare an interest. I was recruited as an administrative officer in 1977 and served until 2003. That means I am biased. But while I have seen the civil service from the inside, I am now enough of a quondam (if you need to look it up, don't apply) to be objective about its Jesuitical mystique.
The role of the administrative officer (AO) is often characterised as 'colonial' - for which read 'undemocratic' - by those who should and often do know better. But it was a success.
Similar elite groups form the core of the civil service in countries from France to Japan.
In the heyday of the British Empire, Hong Kong had been a dumping ground for failed officials, tellingly mocked in Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil. But in the decade following the defeat of Japan, the service here began a metamorphosis into one of the world's most effective covert ruling powers.
There were adventurers from Scotland and the colonies; academics; experienced administrators from Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then named) and Vanuatu; and surviving eccentrics, both Chinese and expatriate, from the Good Old Days.
The result could have been a Noel Coward farce. But it wasn't. It was an exuberant mixture of cultures and talents.
Hong Kong residents could see that you needed engineers to build bridges, doctors to cure patients and policemen to enforce the law. But you also needed individuals to bring together these disciplines, to take decisions with some knowledge of each of them, to develop a rational perspective on the vagaries of competing ideologies.
High technology and low politics have now made the role of the AO grade in Hong Kong even more vital. But change is, alas, always necessary. I put forward the following thoughts for the chief executive's placemen to consider.
One: to justify its existence, the AO grade should welcome an open system in which qualified officers from any other professional grade can move in. If you are the best, what need you fear?
Every successful elite, from the Vatican to the mafia, has prospered by bringing in new blood.
Two: the service should drop the pretence of being politically neutral. How can it be, except in the narrow sense of administrators not campaigning for office?
Every vote in the legislature is for or against the government: this implies that there is an AO/government position.
Three: generalists are generalists. Why not amalgamate the AO and the executive grade as has been done, with great success, in Britain?
Four: if the AO grade is critical to the success of our polity, why not pay by results, and make those results publicly known? Devotees of writer Ian Banks may even recognise that an elite system is one in which employees select their own colleagues for promotion.
The AO cadre can try to console itself with its number of yearly applicants. Many people also aspire to be American presidents.
Only if the grade reinvents itself - drawing freely into its ranks professionals, members of the private sector, communists and even a few foreigners - can it retain its position as first among equals, while Democratic Party member Martin Lee Chu-ming and his outmoded cohorts are still spinning around in Dante's First Circle of the damned and the pointless.
Andrew Wells is a former senior civil servant and a freelance writer
