A magnificent navy on land

The French navy, which Britain has been accustomed to beating for the better part of four centuries, had a frigate off Cyprus in three days after the Iranian drone strike at RAF Akrotiri. It took the Royal Navy eight. When HMS Dragon finally left Portsmouth on the tenth of March, she was one of six Type 45 destroyers in the entire fleet. Behind her she left six frigates, most of them older than their crews. The instinct is to reach for the old lament: “we are not what we were”.

And yet two and a half centuries ago, this entire business was managed from a London townhouse bedroom. In the summer of 1757, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, the Duke of Newcastle, the fussy, insecure supreme electioneer and boroughmonger of eighteenth-century politics, took to his bed. When William Pitt the Elder, his coalition partner and the minister directing the war against France, arrived to talk “blue water” strategy, Newcastle apparently invited him to take the adjacent bed. The two most powerful men in the country thrashed out the direction of a global conflict from their pillows.

The Admiralty that carried out their instructions employed a staff you could fit into a decent London dining room. Its First Lord, George Anson, had circumnavigated the globe and captured a Spanish treasure galleon off the Philippines; one suspects he did not lose much sleep over stakeholder engagement. Within two years, the navy under his direction had broken French sea power at Quiberon Bay, delivered Quebec into British hands, and secured supremacy from the Caribbean to the coast of Coromandel. The system was, of course, corrupt, factional, and often chaotic. It was also, by any sensible reckoning, one of the most effective fighting administrations in the history of European warfare, and it ran on personal trust, connection, and a handful of clerks.

How did we get from there to here? It must be something more than losing the wigs (and the Whigs) and passing the first Reform Act. The answer lies not in scholarly analysis but in good old British satire. In 1955, the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson published a short and wickedly funny essay in The Economist. He called it “Parkinson’s Law, or the Rising Pyramid”, and its central exhibit was the Royal Navy. In 1914 the Navy could be shown as 62 capital ships, 146,000 officers and men, 3,249 dockyard officials and clerks, and 2,000 Admiralty officials. By 1928 there were only 20 capital ships and 100,000 men. The dockyard officials had swollen to 4,558. The Admiralty officials had risen to 3,569: an increase of 78 per cent in a period in which the Navy had diminished by a third in men and two thirds in ships. By 1954, the Admiralty staff numbered 33,788. For every new foreman or electrical engineer at Portsmouth there had to be two more clerks at Charing Cross. He called the result “a magnificent navy on land”.

First, an official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals. And second, officials make work for each other

Parkinson identified two almost axiomatic statements. First, an official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals. And second, officials make work for each other. Parkinson’s parable of the overworked civil servant, conveniently named “A”, as though personality hardly came into it, is delicious. Faced with rising work, “A” does not resign, for he would lose his pension. He does not ask for help from colleague “B”, who would become a rival. He demands instead two subordinates, “C” and “D”, and by dividing the work between them he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends it all. Inevitably “C” demands assistants, and “D” must be given his own, to avert internal friction. Seven officials are now doing what one did before. They make so much work for each other that all are fully occupied, and “A” is actually working harder than ever. It is late in the evening now before “A” finally quits his office and begins the return journey to Ealing (of course), reflecting with bowed shoulders and a wry smile that late hours, like grey hairs, are among the penalties of success.

The phrase “a magnificent navy on land” deserves to hang over every Whitehall department like a sampler in a Victorian schoolroom. The civil service now employs some 555,000 people, its highest headcount in nearly twenty years, although the precise number is conveniently never available. The MoD alone has over 50,000 civil servants on its books. The Navy they are meant to be supporting musters only around 20,000 sailors once the Royal Marines are discounted, and of a combined force of just thirteen destroyers and frigates, only about four are thought to be at sea at any given time. Of the attack submarine fleet, only one boat is thought to be operational. Money and manpower have poured into the administration while the fleet has quietly wasted away. No new frigate has entered operational service since HMS St Albans was commissioned in 2002. The first Type 26, HMS Glasgow, may reach initial operating capability around 2028, if all goes to plan, which in the recent history of British defence procurement it seldom does.

Parkinson, who observed institutions with the detachment of a good naturalist, never claimed to offer a cure: “It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.” He published that in 1955. Since then, the weeds have had seventy years, the Admiralty has been abolished, and the Arch is being turned into a luxury hotel.