Politics and politicisation: bane or boon companion?

The relationship between ministerial advisers and the permanent civil service is an inherently challenging one. The former are political appointees with an explicit remit to apply a political lens to policy-making. The latter are sworn non-partisans, with a duty to speak truth to power in an evidence-based way. This chapter examines how the boundaries between advisers and civil servants are constantly being tested, and the extent to which this leads to new forms of politicisation. The chapter argues that politicisation by advisers is more about a spectrum of behaviour, contextual in nature, than a set of clear constitutional lines that are being crossed. The challenge is not simply to better categorise politicisation, but also to problematise it and contextualise it in ways that neither demonise nor lionise the work that advisers do. The impact of advisers is positioned as just one part of a wider, gradual systemic change towards greater political control that has taken place over decades. Entrenched, institutionalised civil services have come to be seen by politicians of all stripes as normatively undesirable. Civil servants have been increasingly stereotyped as either resistors of the democratic will or unimaginative, risk-averse blockers of dynamic policy-making. Neither picture is necessarily accurate or fair, but both help to provide contextual explanations for the role that advisers are currently playing.