Honourable resignations appear to be a thing of the past. Just look at Northern Ireland’s chief constable
Source - Daily Telegraph - 15/08/23
Summer wouldn’t be summer without some hapless government minister or top public official being prised from their Tuscan villa or Greek beach to attend to a crisis in their department or organisation. Sometimes they resist the demands to return to their cost.
Two years ago, Dominic Raab as foreign secretary, stayed on holiday in Crete amid the debacle of the Afghan withdrawal. Arguably, it lost him his job since he was replaced by Liz Truss in the next reshuffle.
If you are in charge when something goes wrong but are sunning yourself abroad, it is wise to hot-foot it home simply to avoid the “where are you?” question, whether you think it’s fair or not. Simon Byrne, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) did just that when it emerged that the personal data of his entire force had been posted on the internet.
However, he has since discovered that sacrificing his family vacation is not a sufficient penance for the calamity. He is under pressure to resign, but should he go? After all, it was not his fault that information containing the names, ranks, work locations and other details of both warranted officers and civilian staff was accidentally uploaded.
The data had evidently been accessed by an unidentified staff member in order to answer a fairly benign freedom of information request about the size of the force. Disastrously, the raw data was attached to the publicly available file and was on the internet long enough for it to be copied.
It is now in the hands of people who are no friends of the PSNI. Dissident republicans even staged a stunt of pasting a print-out version of the data to a wall opposite Sinn Fein’s Belfast headquarters in the Falls Road.
Catholic officers living in nationalist communities will be especially concerned. Astonishingly, even the details of officers working undercover or attached to MI5 were also divulged. The only saving grace is that their private addresses were not published as well.
It is hard to imagine a more calamitous error, which is why Mr Byrne is facing demands for his resignation on the grounds that someone must, surely, take responsibility for what the chief constable himself conceded was a breach of data security “on an industrial scale”.
President Harry Truman famously kept a sign on his desk that read “The buck stops here”. But very few in high office are any longer prepared to acknowledge their own accountability when things go badly awry.
The so-called “honourable resignation” is pretty much a thing of the past. The last of any note was that of Lord Carrington as foreign secretary, along with two Foreign Office ministers, Humphrey Atkins and Ricard Luce, after the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. Although Mrs Thatcher urged him to stay, he said the humiliation to the country required him to fall on his sword.
Later the same year, William Whitelaw offered his resignation as home secretary after an intruder, Michael Fagan, entered Buckingham Palace unchallenged and made his way into the late Queen’s bedroom. Whitelaw was persuaded that the real fault lay with those directly responsible for the monarch’s security, namely Scotland Yard – but no-one resigned from there either.
There have, of course, been many notable resignations down the years over policy, but these have been manifestations of political differences – like Boris Johnson over Brexit – or personal culpability, as with John Profumo, rather than departures with honour.
Cressida Dick was forced out of the Met by Sadiq Khan after being told to sack officers accused of exchanging racist, misogynist and homophobic messages at a central London police station. This was not her fault and nor was she in a position to do what was asked of her, but the London mayor felt she was accountable for the behaviour of her officers.
Many saw her removal as unfair and self-defeating, dispensing with the services of a highly experienced and much admired senior officer in order to burnish the mayor’s woke credentials. But Mr Byrne is in a different position because the mistake is so serious that someone high up must take a fall and not just the underling directly to blame.
There is too little accountability in the public sector. Hardly anyone gets fired, let alone resigns when things go wrong on their watch. The worst recent example is the hounding and imprisonment of Post Office employees deemed to have defrauded the organisation when the fault lay with a faulty computer system.
One of the greatest miscarriages of justice of modern times has seen not a single resignation by a responsible minister or senior manager because of the scandal. Some have even been rewarded and promoted.
A few public servants have done the proper thing: Paul Gray stepped down as head of HMRC when two computer disks containing the details of 25 million child benefit recipients went missing, accepting it was an operational failure. Mr Byrne himself was investigated when chief constable of Cheshire but cleared of any wrong-doing, after which he was made head of the PSNI.
He may be an able officer, but he is accountable for the operations and security of the police force and this is also an operational breakdown, not just a personal error. Systems, checks, supervision and management all failed, with substantial implications for the PSNI. It will have to finance the cost of rehousing employees who feel compromised or wish to retire early. The impact on recruitment could be profound in a province which has seen a haemorrhaging of officers in recent years.
The data breach has put lives at risk and is a threat to national security so cannot be brushed aside. Twenty five years after the Good Friday Agreement, paramilitaries and organised crime gangs remain a danger to officers in a way not experienced on the mainland. Mr Byrne is no doubt happy to receive plaudits for the PSNI’s successes, but that means taking responsibility for mishaps. The great disconnect between failure and consequence in the public sector is one reason why it performs so poorly so often.
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