Brodie Clark and Theresa May border row: a case of history repeating

Brodie Clark looks like becoming the Derek Lewis of the present government, proving (sadly) that public management in Britain is fated constantly to reinvent the wheel, never learning from history's clear message. Lewis, you may recall, was the highly-regarded manager who thought he had been told by then home secretary Michael Howard to go off and run the prison service more efficiently and effectively, at arm's length from Whitehall, using his discretion. Instead, Howard sacked him, in 1995 - for the sin of exercising managerial discretion. (This infamously came back to haunt Howard, when he was asked 14 times if he threatened to overrule Lewis by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight ) Now here is Clark, head of the border force in the UK Border Agency, exercising managerial discretion within (he says) an agreed policy framework, only to find himself suspended and repudiated. Unusually, he has now resigned, freeing him to speak while he pursues a case for unfair dismissal . The fate of home secretary Theresa May hangs in the balance. Old timers will say we should avoid generalisation. Such bruising encounters of ministers and management come with this particular turf. Prisons are like immigration, policing and drugs in belonging to a class of "wicked" administrative issues. Storms can break suddenly and sweep ministers to oblivion, which is why politicians get so twitchy and prone to denial. Yet these perennial crises are costly. Policing and order deserve better than the whirligig of home secretaries in recent years. And what price effective management, let alone public service transformation when managers can't know whether exercising their professional judgement can, at any moment, land them on the front pages or even sacked? The issue of principle goes well beyond the Home Office and its agencies. We seem to be no nearer mapping the border between ministers (or councillors?) and managers than we were a generation ago when Margaret Thatcher asked Sir Peter Kemp to devise "Next Steps" and push work out to semi-autonomous agencies. Health secretary Andrew Lansley tried to dodge the bullet by removing ministerial responsibility altogether in his original plan for the NHS. It would have been an interesting experiment, with MPs forbidden from raising concerns about hospitals or services in the Commons, being forced instead to take them up with foundation trust boards or GPs. If anything, the problem is getting worse. MPs, including Tory representatives in ostensibly well-heeled constituencies, receive swollen postbags; people attend their surgeries asking for redress and assistance with public bodies, including the Home Office, the Department of Work and Pensions and, of course, the NHS. They will take matters up with managers of JobCentrePlus branches and chief executives of hospitals, but as political representatives they reserve their right to get a minister to respond, preferably in full public gaze on the floor of the Commons. In that context, their understanding of and tolerance for managerial discretion is limited. The experience of Dave Hartnett, permanent secretary for taxation at HM Revenue & Customs illustrates another facet of the same phenomenon. On Monday he was up before the beak - Margaret Hodge and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) - yet again, charged with letting Goldman Sachs off the hook to the tune of billions of pounds. The PAC has exposed yawning gaps in the good governance of HMRC but the MPs have also opened to question whether officials should exercise discretion - in this case whether tax officers should have leeway in negotiating a settlement with a corporate taxpayer. The PAC would say the priority is securing revenue, and failure on that count is what the MPs are holding against Hartnett. Yet in the background you can feel their discontent with both the principle and practice of managerial autonomy, because it seems to subvert parliamentary accountability and demands large amounts of trust to be placed in civil servants when (as the weekly bundle of National Audit Office reports demonstrates) civil servants don't always deliver cost effective government. So, barely 18 months into its life, the government has junked all those promises about letting managers manage and not interfering like its Labour predecessor. It seems we are no nearer an agreed formula for letting public service professionals get on with it, with any assurance that they will get political support when the waters roil and the seas get choppy. This article is published by Guardian Professional . Join the Guardian Public Leaders Network free to receive regular emails on the issues at the top of the professional agenda.