Earlier this month, on a joint visit to the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Queen spoke of the values of integrity and duty that mark out the British civil service. “A life of public service is an honourable calling,” she said. That standout line in her speech had been suggested weeks before by Chris Martin, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, who devoted his Whitehall career to advancing the idea that to serve the state was noble and should be respected as such.
Martin, who has died of cancer aged 42, had always thought deeply about the place of the civil service in the constitution. He wrote his university dissertation on its role, and was a compulsive reader of biographies and political works that helped him understand its history and its place in the British story. The network of relationships he built up through successive jobs at the top of Whitehall was not just tactical; he used it wherever he could to enlist support for the civil service as an essential institution.
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