by The former monarch offers unsolicited restructuring advice to the modern civil service
Good evening, good evening, mind the low ceiling in this particular cellar bar in Clapham, for I have hit my head twice already and I am reliably informed a third concussion is genuinely worse for a five-hundred-year-old skull than for a younger one.
I read this week that the Government has announced plans to break up the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, prompting a parliamentary committee to seek formal explanation, a bureaucratic reorganisation I found, as a man with genuine historical experience dissolving large institutions he found inconvenient, worth discussing tonight.
On The Matter Of Breaking Up Large Institutions
I once dissolved considerably larger and older institutions than a single government department, an entire monastic system in fact, and I did so without a single committee seeking explanation from me, mostly because I owned the committee, and the church, and eventually most of the available real estate in question. Modern government, I am told, requires actual accountability for this sort of decision. I find this development genuinely admirable, if considerably more time-consuming than my own preferred method.
A Word On Why Institutions Get Broken Up In The First Place
Every institutional restructuring, whether mine or this one, tends to follow a genuinely similar pattern, someone at the top decides the current arrangement no longer serves their purposes efficiently, and considerable disruption follows for everyone actually working within said institution. I do sympathise with the civil servants currently uncertain about their departmental future. I once made an entire class of monks uncertain about their future too, though admittedly with rather more finality than a simple reorganisation memo.
The Closer
I shall leave you with this. Institutions rise, institutions fall, institutions occasionally get split into two smaller institutions for reasons a parliamentary committee will spend considerable time investigating. I did my own version of this with rather less paperwork and rather more executions, and I genuinely believe the modern approach, whatever its bureaucratic tedium, represents a meaningful civilizational improvement. Good night, mind the ceiling, and if you work at DSIT, my sincere sympathies for whatever your new departmental letterhead ends up saying.
An Encore Nobody Asked For
One more thing before I’m cut off, as is apparently customary once a comedian overstays his welcome, a fate considerably less permanent than my own at Tower Hill, though I’m told it feels similarly abrupt to the performer experiencing it. In the green room, surrounded by crisps and an inexplicable stack of traffic cones, I kept thinking about how every institutional split eventually produces two smaller, confused institutions where one confident institution used to stand, much like my own kingdom after I’d finished reorganising the church, the succession, and several marriages simultaneously.
Let me leave you with this, and then truly I must go, for the promoter has begun that specific throat-cutting gesture. Bureaucratic restructuring, friends, whatever century, whatever department, remains genuinely disruptive to the actual people caught inside it. Good night, mind your own departmental reorganisation, whatever form it eventually takes.
