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This was stymied by Sir William Armstrong who told Crossman I shall have to

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This was stymied by Sir William Armstrong, who told Crossman, "I shall have to consult some of my friends." In early December Armstrong, then head of the Civil Service, came back to Crossman and said: "We have consulted. Miss Riddelsdell is good at policy but she couldn't manage the ministry. You will have to have somebody from outside." In fact Mildred Riddelsdell was to become Second Permanent Secretary in 1971 at the request of the incoming Conservative Secretary of State, Keith Joseph (who had consulted Crossman) She retired in 1973 on her 60th birthday. "You know, Tam, it was like visiting Mussolini and his advisers." Towards the end of the 1966-70 Labour government Crossman described Mildred Riddelsdell as a really outstanding and able civil servant of deep personal integrity. He wanted her in 1969 to succeed Sir Clifford Jarrett as Permanent Secretary of the department. She was the antithesis of the stuffy civil servant, other than when the occasion demanded it.

I laughed like a drain on 3 November 1969 when she quite improperly told me about the meeting that Crossman had had flanked by herself, Douglas Overend, David Ennals and John Atkinson with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the senior Treasury mandarins She said to me in a po-faced way with a twinkle in her eye. I don't think it would be true to say that all civil servants are like this, that nobody ever battles in a calculated way, but she was excited by this naughtiness and pleased that her Secretary of State had been so successful." It was part of Riddelsdell's charm that she could be naughty for the most upright and worthwhile of causes. On train journeys or in the ministerial car she could be very amusing and perceptive in her judgements. On Monday 8 September 1969, the complex contributions row had not subsided. Crossman again: "I went out of the room and Miss Riddelsdell said, "Well, Secretary of State," in a rather breathless way, "it certainly worked, didn't it? I couldn't believe it when you asked me to write the paper that way.

We couldn't write in 1.4 with any conviction but it worked." She had a naughty glint in her eye as if to say, "To think that the Chancellor of the Exchequer could fall for such a simple device as that." It only indicates what the political negotiation is and that the papers put up between ministers are political in a sense that civil servants, particularly, I think, civil servants in Social Security, find it hard to understand. When I opened the box I found that Miss Riddelsdell had done exactly what I had told her not to do and had written a paper firmly committing me to a 1.3 [per cent] contribution rather than a 1.25 contribution I telephoned her and she said, "Oh, I am so sorry. It is a real misunderstanding, I must apologise." A few years ago I would have been furiously saying that these bloody civil servants deliberately deceive the minister but I don't say that any more. "I simply know Miss Riddelsdell assumed that I, being intelligent, would want what she wanted, and therefore she heard me say what she wanted me to say and misunderstood me." Mildred Riddelsdell was loyal to ministers, but perhaps even more loyal to departmental wisdom. Crossman's diary for Thursday 4 September 1969 records: "While we were in the Lakes a red box arrived on the Saturday, but this wasn't much good because I had frantic difficulty in getting a key posted up, which only arrived on our last day, the Tuesday. She bore the heavy end of the stick in the transfer from her old headquarters in John Adams Street, a quarter of an hour's walk from Downing Street, to Elephant and Castle, which might have been Outer Mongolia, involving as it did both distance and traffic jams Riddelsdell had her moments with Crossman. My first recollection is of how grateful he was for Riddelsdell's briefing when he went with her and his Minister for Social Security, David Ennals, to confront the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, in his lair in the Treasury.

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