My Father and the Chancellor’s Toilet

As Westminster speculates about who will occupy the great offices of state over the coming months, I'm reminded of a story my father used to tell, about his own brief career at HM Treasury.

Once upon a time, back in the late 1960s, my father John Toye was a young fast-streamer civil servant at the Treasury. After getting a double starred first at Cambridge in History, followed by a Frank Knox Scholarship year at Harvard, he was ready to get his teeth into all the challenges of learning how to run the country. And he was assigned as Personal Private Secretary to a man called Sir David Serpell.

Fans of Yes Minister will recognise the role: Bernard Woolley is the Personal Private Secretary to Minister Jim Hacker. My father occupied the same post, albeit to a senior civil servant rather than to a minister, and in real life rather than satire. (Although the latter distinction, as this story will demonstrate, can be difficult to maintain.)

My father's boss, Sir David Serpell, was apparently an able and effective administrator whose 2008 obituary in The Independent highlights his many achievements. But it also quotes a former colleague, Sir George Moseley, describing him as "a bit of a martinet" to junior staff.

That phrase is doing a lot of work.

My father spent months trying to meet Serpell's impossible standards. The reward for success was not appreciation, but ever more elaborate tests of his competence.

As you may know, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has a private lavatory. And Serpell, as a Second Secretary and soon-to-be Permanent Secretary, believed that he should also have access to this privileged facility. The final straw for my father came when, one day, Serpell came up with a new assignment: Obtain a key to the Chancellor's lavatory.

Initially, my father was stumped. How on earth was he to find out who, besides the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, held keys to the Chancellor's toilet, or indeed who decided who was entitled to hold one - let alone persuade them that Sir David Serpell should be admitted to that very exclusive club?

And then, he had a moment of clarity. This was an administrative problem. Just like other administrative problems, it had an administrative solution. So, he drafted a memo, along these lines:

He circulated it to the entire department.

Having addressed the problem as best he could, my father concluded that he had learned everything he needed to know about life at the Treasury. He resigned, and after working out his notice, went to SOAS to do a master’s degree in economics, and in due course became a distinguished development economist.

Interestingly, during my father's notice period, Serpell suddenly started being nice as pie  - and my father realised that he had probably been the most efficient and obliging PPS that Serpell had ever had, and had lasted a lot longer than most of his predecessors.

And so, through the poor personal behaviour of one otherwise able senior administrator, the civil service lost an exemplary junior one.

Sadly, despite my historian brother Richard Toye's efforts to find the original memo in the Treasury archives, he hasn't been able to track it down. Not every government document survives - but I like to think that the memo is still there, somewhere at the bottom of an old file, waiting to be chanced across sometime in the next few hundred years.

But my father’s work at the Treasury was not forgotten. Decades later, when he was approaching retirement, my Dad was at a dinner at Wolfson College in Cambridge, and got talking to a younger man, who it turned out was himself a Treasury civil servant. Of course, my Dad said "Oh, what a coincidence - I started my career at the Treasury." And the younger man exclaimed: "Oh my goodness - you're not that Toye? The one who sent round the memo about the Chancellor's loo?"