Introduction

The ideal civil servant comes out of a Victorian notion of what it is to be a public servant. Like most ideals, the sort of myth of the 19th century civil servant has a long and interesting history but remains very much a myth. The great foundation document of the modern civil service is the North Trevellian Report of 1854 when the then then permanent secretary Charles Trevellian was tasked with looking at how to reform the civil service. Now, he's produced this wonderful report which is still referred to all these years later if you look at it. It's full of politics, it's full of very little evidence and a lot of advocacy. And what we would now consider a merit