Sir Humphrey he ain’t

Noti

By Mario Cutajar

Published by Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2025

Mario Cutajar spent most of his professional life in the public service, heading it for almost a decade from 2013 onwards. He also put in a number of years in the bowels of the General Workers’ Union and has been a dyed- in-the-wool Mintoff groupie from adolescence. In his recollections, Noti, these interlocking experiences fuelled his drive, tussled his politics and animated his public spiritedness.

I’ll start with my pet subject. He “seriously doubts” we have a sense of state. Becoming independent, a republic and chasing off the last British soldier did not disengage us from the colonial “vice (morsa)… in which the ruler decides what to do with the country while the rest of us think only of our daily bread – every day for today”.

Even our museums, about which he knows a thing or two, are still jammed in this colonial mentality. The colonisers dominate the historical picture, airbrushing out locals almost completely. In the same vein, he interestingly argues that clientelism has its roots in our colonial past rather than in the electoral system as is still commonly believed.

Did our public service step in to shore up our anaemic sense of state? Not quite, according to Cutajar. The various attempts to “reform” it in the four decades following Mintoff’s 1971 electoral victory all failed, some more miserably than others. The Quality Service Charters, in vogue in the 1990s, and the Management Systems Unit all sank without a trace.

Why? The author thinks that, left to its own devices, the public service tends to administer rather than reach out. It looks out for itself with a default pivot towards the status quo. To compound matters, we transposed rule by empire to our own of life, turning it into “an indigenous specialty”. No matter how inconsequential and petty the stakes, we just love to build empires on them. The public service is prime real estate for this purpose.

So are all public service staff locked into this mould? The author does not think so. He distinguishes between those who make a career out of the civil service from those who make a career in it. Perhaps for the same reason, he is emphatic on retaining reforms at arm’s length from negotiations over staff conditions and pay.

How did Cutajar try to change the public service when he ran it?

His mantra was “3D planning: define, design, deliver”. It was a technology driven plan which sets out to relentlessly simplify rules and processes, centralise public-facing services online, and steamroller over ingrained Byzantine complexities. It was a plan to rally and motivate, dovetailing with Cutajar’s passionate insistence on measures rather instead of initiatives.

The public service tends to administer rather than reach out

Rooted in a plan, the former are the real deal. Without such roots, latter are expensive roads to nowhere. The book is rich in granular details on how the public service used to operate and how it has changed on his watch. Will Cutajar’s plans survive his departure? We’ll see. How do the public service and politics cohabit? This is where Cutajar’s beautiful and engaging tug of war plays out in his being. It’s where the author’s pen stands in for the handkerchief in the middle of the strained rope.

Cutajar writes as an architect of a more robust public service, a new citadel within the state, strong enough to keep the ministers at bay outside its bastions. “The public service remains credible and trusted only as long as it continues to drive itself and showing that it is doing so. When what is etched in law and regulations is not followed in practice, not only does the drive forward slow down but the clock is turned back.”

Simultaneously, however, he rallies for the shining citadel as a party boy. He often speaks of “we” when he refers to the Labour Party. You read a page of erudite minutiae of correct public service procedures and rituals. You flip it and discover a photo of him in the electoral war room of the Labour Party just before the 2013 election. Not quite Sir Humphrey.

The author states that our administrative system is based on the English one, taking on Maltese “characteristics” at a later stage. So is the public service destined to be pulled at one end by a closet reverence for the English model and a Mediterranean, hyper-politicised post-colonial collective consciousness at the other?

Is this tug of war rooted in contradiction? I don’t think so. Ultimately, every public service reflects the nation it serves and is moulded by its local political culture. Let’s face it, behind Sir Humphrey’s charm and exquisite humour lurks the genius of genteel British hypocrisy.

Finally, a bit of hardcore politics. How does a democratic socialist like Cutajar, who refuses to live in the past, remain true to his political faith today? Now that the war horse of classical democratic socialism – the welfare state – has been mounted by every party on the ideological spectrum, where should it trot to?

Cutajar might be tempted to give local answers to these vexing questions in his next book. It would certainly be another great pleasure to read.