The Department of Honesty

The Department of Honesty was established on a Tuesday in October, which was appropriate, because Tuesdays are the day of the week most likely to go unnoticed. The Prime Minister announced it during a press conference that had been scheduled to discuss flooding in the Midlands, so that if the Department proved embarrassing — and there was no reason to suppose it wouldn’t — the government could later claim the announcement had been taken out of context, which was, in a sense, the entire problem the Department had been created to solve.

“This government,” said the Prime Minister, gripping both sides of the lectern as though it might otherwise escape, “is committed to restoring public trust through a bold new culture of transparency, openness, and accountability.”

The journalists wrote this down. Several of them underlined “bold.” None of them believed it. The Prime Minister did not believe it either, but he had been told that if you say something with sufficient conviction, it becomes operationally true — a principle he had found applied equally to fiscal policy, election promises, and his marriage.

The Department was given offices on the fourth floor of a building in Whitehall that had previously housed the Advisory Committee on Livestock Tagging, which had been dissolved after it emerged that none of its seven members had ever seen a cow. The offices still smelled faintly of paper and defeat. A portrait of an unidentified Victorian gentleman hung in the corridor, gazing down at visitors with the expression of a man who had invested heavily in railways and had opinions about where they were heading.

The Department’s founding charter was seventeen pages long and had been drafted by Sir Humphrey Pennock-Smythe, a Permanent Secretary of the old school — which is to say, a man who believed that the purpose of government was to govern, the purpose of governing was to administer, and the purpose of administration was to ensure that nothing happened that had not already been approved by someone who was no longer available to explain why they had approved it. Sir Humphrey had a face like a walnut and a voice like a closing door. He had served under four Prime Ministers and remembered none of them fondly, though he remembered all of them precisely, which was worse.

The charter’s central regulation — Regulation 1(a) — stated: “All officials of Her Majesty’s Government shall, in the conduct of their duties, communicate honestly and without deliberate falsehood to members of the public, the press, and Parliament.”

Regulation 1(b), which appeared on the following page and was printed in slightly smaller type, stated: “Officials shall not, in the conduct of their duties, disclose any information that might undermine public confidence in the institutions of government.”

This presented what Sir Humphrey described, with characteristic precision, as “a slight operational tension.” He said this in the same tone one might use to describe a slight operational tension between a lit match and a room full of natural gas.

The Department’s first Director was a man called Gerald Fitch-Barrow, who had been selected for the role because he was the Home Secretary’s brother-in-law and because he had once, at a dinner party, expressed the opinion that politicians should “probably tell the truth more often, or something.” This qualified him in the same way that having once visited a hospital qualified a person to perform surgery.

Gerald was fifty-three, had attended Winchester and read Classics at Balliol, and possessed that particular species of confidence that comes from having been told, from birth, that one’s opinions are interesting. He had never held a government position. He had spent twenty-seven years in management consultancy, where his primary skill had been the production of reports recommending further reports. He wore his tie slightly loose, as if to suggest he was a man who got things done, and he carried a leather portfolio everywhere, though it contained nothing but a copy of the Racing Post and a parking receipt from 2019.

Gerald’s first act as Director was to convene a meeting of the Department’s staff, which consisted of himself, a deputy director named Patricia Holloway who had been transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture as part of what Human Resources described as a “lateral opportunity” and Patricia described as “punishment,” and a junior civil servant named Deepak Mistry, who was twenty-four years old, had graduated top of his class at the London School of Economics, and had been assigned to the Department of Honesty because he had, on his application form, listed “integrity” as a personal strength, which the placement algorithm had interpreted as a subject-matter qualification.

“Right,” said Gerald, settling into the chair at the head of the conference table and placing his portfolio before him with the gravity of a man opening a nuclear briefcase. “Our mission is clear. We are here to make the government honest. Any thoughts?”

“It might help,” said Patricia, who was fifty-one and had the eyes of a woman who had seen everything and was not impressed by any of it, “to define what we mean by honest.”

“Honest,” said Gerald. “You know. Truthful. Straightforward. Cards on the table.”

“In government?”

“Yes.”

Patricia looked at Gerald for a long time. It was the look a veterinarian gives a horse before delivering unfortunate news about its legs.

“I see,” she said.

The Department’s first task was to produce a set of guidelines for government communications. Gerald delegated this to Deepak, because Gerald believed firmly in delegation, which he had once described in a consultancy report as “the strategic deployment of other people’s effort.” Deepak, who had not yet learned that enthusiasm in the civil service is treated roughly the way the immune system treats a virus, spent three weeks producing a forty-page document titled “Speaking Truth: A Framework for Honest Government Communication.”

The document was thorough. It was well-researched. It contained flowcharts. It recommended, among other things, that government press releases should contain only verifiable facts, that ministers should not describe things that had not happened as things that had happened, and that the phrase “going forward” should be eliminated from official communications on the grounds that it was neither honest nor dishonest but existed in a linguistic netherworld where meaning went to die.

Gerald read the first page, nodded several times, and passed it to Sir Humphrey, who read the entire document with the expression of a man watching a small child attempt to drive a lorry.

“Mr. Mistry,” said Sir Humphrey, summoning Deepak to his office the following afternoon. The office was panelled in oak and smelled of furniture polish and centuries of carefully managed decline. “Your document suggests that government press releases should contain only verifiable facts.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what, in your view, would a government press release containing only verifiable facts look like?”

Deepak considered this. “It would… state what has actually occurred, using precise language, with supporting evidence.”

“I see. And have you considered the possibility that if government press releases contained only verifiable facts, there would be no government press releases?”

“I — ”

“Furthermore, your recommendation that ministers not describe things that have not happened as things that have happened would, if implemented, eliminate approximately ninety percent of ministerial activity, which consists entirely of describing things that have not happened as things that are about to happen, which they also will not.”

“But surely — ”

“You have also recommended the elimination of ‘going forward.’ I admire the impulse. But ‘going forward’ is load-bearing. Remove it and entire speeches collapse. Ministers would be forced to specify when they intend to do the things they are promising to do, and the answer in most cases is ‘never,’ which, while honest, rather defeats the purpose of a speech.”

Sir Humphrey folded the document in half, then folded it again, then placed it in his outgoing tray, which, Deepak noted, was also his recycling bin.

“Perhaps,” said Sir Humphrey, “a second draft.”

The second draft was shorter. Deepak, with Patricia’s guidance, had reduced the recommendations to twelve. Patricia explained that in government, the likelihood of a recommendation being adopted was inversely proportional to the number of recommendations: one recommendation might be accepted; twelve would be studied; forty would be praised and ignored. She explained this while eating a sandwich at her desk, which she did every day because she had learned years ago that the canteen was where careers went to be overheard.

Patricia had, in her twenty-six years of civil service, developed a taxonomy of government futility that she shared with Deepak in instalments, like a novelist serializing a very depressing book. There were, she explained, three kinds of government initiative: those that failed immediately (which were called “learning experiences”), those that failed slowly (which were called “ongoing”), and those that succeeded in doing something no one had wanted done (which were called “legacies”). The Department of Honesty, she suspected, would achieve the rare distinction of being all three simultaneously.

Among the surviving recommendations was Guideline 7: “When asked a direct question, officials should provide a direct answer.”

This proved to be the Department’s undoing, though not immediately. Undoing in government operates on a geological timescale. The first tremor came three weeks after the guidelines were circulated, when a BBC journalist named Sophie Kwan asked the Health Secretary, during a live interview, whether hospital waiting times had increased under the current government.

The Health Secretary, who had been briefed by her communications team using the old guidelines (which permitted the technique known as “pivoting,” whereby a question about hospitals could be answered with a speech about the economy, a question about the economy could be answered with an attack on the opposition, and a question about the opposition could be answered by pretending one’s earpiece had malfunctioned), began to pivot.

Then she remembered the memo. Guideline 7. She paused. She experienced what the Department’s later internal review would describe as “a moment of regulatory compliance.”

“Yes,” she said.

There was a silence. Sophie Kwan, who had been bracing herself for a three-minute answer about infrastructure spending, had no follow-up prepared. She had not anticipated the truth. No one at the BBC had anticipated the truth. The BBC had, in fact, budgeted no time for the truth, having allocated the entire segment to the traditional exchange of non-answers.

In the gallery, a producer dropped his coffee. Someone said a word that could not be broadcast. On Twitter, the clip went viral before the interview had finished. “HEALTH SECRETARY ADMITS WAITING TIMES UP” ran the headline in the Evening Standard. “GOVERNMENT IN CRISIS AFTER MINISTER TELLS TRUTH” ran the Guardian’s, which was longer but, for once, more accurate.

The opposition demanded an emergency debate. The Leader of the Opposition stood in the House of Commons and declared that the government’s decision to tell the truth about hospital waiting times was “an act of reckless transparency that undermined public confidence in the NHS.” No one on either side of the chamber noticed the irony. Or rather, everyone noticed it and no one mentioned it, which in Parliament amounts to the same thing.

Gerald was summoned to Downing Street the following morning. He brought his portfolio. He wore his tie slightly loose. He was, he felt, ready to explain the Department’s position, which was that honesty was working exactly as intended. This was incorrect, but Gerald’s relationship with correctness had always been more aspirational than practical.

The Prime Minister was already in the room when Gerald arrived, seated behind his desk with Sir Humphrey standing beside him like a tall, expensive piece of furniture that had opinions.

“Gerald,” said the Prime Minister.

“Prime Minister.”

“Your Department has caused the Health Secretary to tell the truth on live television.”

“Yes. Well. That is rather the point of — ”

“The point,” said the Prime Minister, leaning forward with the careful emphasis of a man explaining something to a golden retriever, “was to restore public confidence. The public does not gain confidence when ministers admit that things are going badly. The public gains confidence when ministers assert, with conviction, that things are going well, or failing that, that things are going badly because of the previous government, or failing that, that the question itself is unfair.”

“But Regulation 1(a) — ”

“Regulation 1(a) says officials should communicate honestly. It does not say they should communicate honestly about things that are embarrassing. There is a distinction.”

Gerald looked at Sir Humphrey, who offered the faint, sympathetic smile of a man watching someone else fall down stairs.

“Perhaps,” said Sir Humphrey, “we might revisit the operational interpretation.”

What followed was a period that the Department’s internal records would later refer to as “the Reconciliation Phase,” and which Deepak, in his private notebook, referred to as “the bit where everything went mad.”

The problem was structural, and it was beautiful in the way that a perfect knot is beautiful to everyone except the person trying to untie it. Regulation 1(a) required honesty. Regulation 1(b) prohibited honesty about anything embarrassing. Guideline 7 required direct answers to direct questions. But the Prime Minister’s instruction required that direct answers be given only when the truth was politically convenient, which, statistically, it was not.

Gerald’s solution was to issue an amendment: Regulation 1(c), which stated that “the requirements of 1(a) shall apply except in cases where compliance with 1(a) would result in a violation of 1(b), in which case 1(b) shall take precedence, unless the matter in question has already been reported in the press, in which case 1(a) applies, since there is no point in being dishonest about something everyone already knows.”

This created an incentive structure under which government officials were required to be honest about things that had already been leaked and dishonest about things that hadn’t. The result was that every department in Whitehall began strategically leaking its own embarrassing information so that it could then be honest about it under Regulation 1(c), thereby satisfying Regulation 1(a) while technically not violating 1(b), since the information was no longer confidential.

Within a month, more classified documents were being leaked to journalists by the government itself than by any external source. The intelligence services were reportedly furious, not because of the security implications, but because they were being outperformed.

The Ministry of Defence leaked a report on procurement failures so that the Defence Secretary could honestly discuss them at a select committee. The Treasury leaked its own growth projections so the Chancellor could admit they were disappointing without violating 1(b), since the Guardian had already printed them. The Foreign Office leaked a confidential assessment of a trade deal so unfavourable that the responsible minister later described it, with newly permitted honesty, as “the diplomatic equivalent of agreeing to mow your neighbour’s lawn in exchange for being allowed to watch him eat your dinner.”

Sophie Kwan, the BBC journalist whose original question had started the cascade, won a BAFTA for her follow-up series “The Truth Is Out,” in which she simply asked government ministers direct questions and recorded their visible psychological distress as they attempted to comply with Regulation 1(a) while remembering 1(b) while calculating whether 1(c) applied. The footage of the Transport Secretary silently opening and closing his mouth for eleven seconds before saying “trains” was viewed forty million times.

Sir Humphrey observed these developments with what might, in a less disciplined man, have been satisfaction. “The system,” he told Gerald, “is functioning precisely as one would expect.”

“Is it?” said Gerald.

“Oh yes. It is consuming itself with perfect efficiency. That is what systems do.”

Deepak, meanwhile, had begun to experience what he would later describe to his therapist as “a crisis of operational epistemology.” He had joined the Department because he believed in honesty. He still believed in honesty. The problem was that he now worked inside a machine whose sole function was to define honesty in such a way that it was indistinguishable from dishonesty, and he was beginning to suspect that this was not a bug but the founding principle.

He raised this concern with Patricia over lunch in the canteen, which served a lasagna that appeared to have been made by someone who had once had lasagna described to them over the telephone.

“The whole thing is circular,” he said. “We can’t be honest about the fact that the Department of Honesty isn’t working, because admitting it isn’t working would undermine public confidence, which is what the Department was supposed to build. So we have to be dishonest about our failure to produce honesty. Which means the Department’s only actual output is dishonesty about dishonesty.”

Patricia ate a forkful of lasagna and regarded him with the weary patience of a woman who had arrived at this conclusion approximately twenty years earlier.

“Welcome to government,” she said.

“But doesn’t that bother you?”

“Deepak, I once spent three years on a committee whose purpose was to evaluate whether a different committee was necessary. We concluded that it was. The second committee then spent two years evaluating whether our committee’s conclusion had been sound. They concluded that it had, but recommended a third committee to verify their conclusion. I left before the third committee reported. That was 2014. As far as I know, the fourth committee is still sitting.”

“There’s a fourth committee?”

“There’s always a fourth committee. The fourth committee is the event horizon of British governance. Nothing escapes it. No information returns from it. It simply sits there, being a committee, generating minutes that no one reads and recommendations that no one implements, and occasionally requesting a budget increase, which it receives, because denying a budget increase would require a committee to evaluate whether the denial was justified.”

Deepak put down his fork. The lasagna had begun to seem like a metaphor, though for what, he wasn’t certain. He looked around the canteen. Civil servants sat at tables in groups of two and three, eating food of uncertain provenance and discussing, in low voices, projects whose outcomes had been predetermined by people who had already retired. It was, he thought, like watching a play in which all the actors knew the script was nonsense but continued performing because the theatre was warm and the alternative was outside.

The Department’s end came, as most governmental ends do, not with a dramatic collapse but with a slow, bureaucratic suffocation — a kind of administrative asphyxiation so gradual that by the time anyone noticed, the corpse had been filing its own paperwork for six weeks.

The immediate cause was the Transparency Report.

Parliament, in its infinite capacity for creating obligations no one wanted, required the Department to produce a quarterly Transparency Report detailing its activities, accomplishments, and failures. The first report was due in January. Gerald, who had by this point developed a faint tremor in his left hand and a habit of staring at the portrait of the Victorian gentleman as if hoping for guidance, assigned the report to Deepak.

“Just… write what we’ve done,” said Gerald.

“What have we done?” said Deepak.

Gerald opened his portfolio, stared into it for a moment, and closed it again.

“We’ve had some very productive meetings,” he said.

The report was the moment when the Department’s internal contradictions achieved what physicists call criticality and what comedians call the punchline. Deepak could not write honestly about the Department’s failures, because that would violate Regulation 1(b). He could not write dishonestly about the Department’s successes, because that would violate Regulation 1(a). He could not claim the Department had accomplished nothing, because that would be honest. He could not claim the Department had accomplished something, because that would be dishonest. He considered simply not writing the report, but Parliament had passed a regulation requiring the report to be filed, and failing to file it would itself require a report explaining why no report had been filed, which would be subject to the same constraints.

He sat at his desk for two full days, staring at a blank document. The cursor blinked at him with the patient malice of a system that had been designed, at every level, to ensure that the only people capable of describing reality accurately were prohibited from doing so.

On the third day, he wrote a single sentence: “The Department of Honesty has, in the period under review, been entirely honest about everything it is permitted to be honest about.”

Gerald read the sentence. He read it again. He experienced a brief, vertiginous sensation, as if the floor had shifted beneath him, and then he initialed it and sent it to Sir Humphrey, who read it with something that might have been admiration.

“This,” said Sir Humphrey, “is a masterpiece. It says absolutely nothing while appearing to say everything. It satisfies both 1(a) and 1(b) simultaneously. It is the Platonic ideal of a government communication.”

“Is that good?” said Gerald.

“It is perfect,” said Sir Humphrey. “It means the Department is working.”

“But the Department isn’t — ”

“Gerald. The Department exists to produce the appearance of honesty. It has produced the appearance of honesty. What more could one want?”

Gerald looked at Sir Humphrey. Sir Humphrey looked at Gerald. The Victorian gentleman looked at them both. Somewhere in the building, a pipe made a sound like a man clearing his throat to say something important, then thinking better of it.

“I think,” said Gerald slowly, “that I might resign.”

“I rather think you might,” said Sir Humphrey.

Gerald’s resignation letter was, by Sir Humphrey’s account, the most honest communication the Department of Honesty ever produced. It stated that Gerald had taken the position in good faith, had discovered that good faith was operationally incompatible with government, and wished to return to management consultancy, where the gap between stated purpose and actual function was understood by all parties to be a feature rather than a defect.

The letter was not released to the public. Regulation 1(b).

Patricia was offered the directorship and declined it with the speed of a woman who had been offered a seat on a sinking ship and could swim. She transferred to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, where she was placed in charge of a new initiative to improve soil quality. “At least soil doesn’t lie to you,” she told Deepak on her last day. “It’s either good soil or it isn’t. You can test it. The results are reproducible. I am going to spend the rest of my career with soil.” She said this with the fervour of a convert.

Deepak was offered the directorship next, on the grounds that he was the only remaining member of the Department. He accepted, because he was twenty-four and had not yet learned that the worst thing that can happen to you in the civil service is to be given exactly what you asked for.

As Director, Deepak’s first act was to request a meeting with Sir Humphrey. It was granted three weeks later, because three weeks was the minimum delay that signified the meeting was being taken seriously; anything sooner would have suggested urgency, which in Whitehall is considered vulgar, like running.

“Sir Humphrey,” said Deepak, seated in the chair where Gerald had once sat with his portfolio and his racing paper and his doomed, loose-tied confidence. “I’d like to propose a fundamental restructuring of the Department.”

“By all means.”

“I want to abolish Regulation 1(b).”

Sir Humphrey’s expression did not change. It rarely did. The man’s face had the emotional range of a diplomatic communiqué.

“You wish to remove the regulation prohibiting disclosures that undermine public confidence.”

“Yes. If we’re going to be honest, we should be honest about everything. Including our own failures.”

“And you believe the government would support this?”

“The government created the Department to promote honesty. This is the honest thing to do.”

“The government created the Department to promote the appearance of honesty. These are different things. They are, in fact, opposite things. The appearance of honesty requires the suppression of actual honesty, because actual honesty is almost always embarrassing, and embarrassment undermines the appearance of competence, which is the only form of competence that matters in government.”

Deepak sat with this for a moment. The Victorian gentleman gazed down at him. The pipe in the wall cleared its throat again.

“That’s insane,” said Deepak.

“That is governance,” said Sir Humphrey. “One does not run a country by telling the truth. One runs a country by maintaining the conditions under which the truth is unnecessary. The public does not want the truth. The public wants to be told that someone competent is handling things. Whether anyone competent is actually handling things is, as a practical matter, irrelevant, and as a philosophical matter, unanswerable, since competence in government is measured entirely by the absence of visible failure, and the purpose of the civil service is to ensure that failure, when it occurs, is not visible.”

“And when it is visible?”

“Then it occurred under the previous government.”

The Department of Honesty survived for another eight months. It produced four Transparency Reports, each consisting of a single sentence that said everything and nothing. It issued thirty-seven guidelines, of which thirty-four contradicted at least one other guideline, and three contradicted themselves. It processed 142 requests for clarification about what “honesty” meant in the context of Regulation 1(a), and responded to each with a letter explaining that the Department was not at liberty to discuss the operational definition of honesty, as doing so might undermine public confidence in the concept.

It also hired six new staff members, because a department of three people could not justify its office space, and justifying office space required a staff complement proportional to the square footage, a calculation overseen by the Estates Division, which had never questioned whether the Department needed the office space in the first place, because questioning another department’s needs was not in its remit, and expanding its remit would require a committee. The six new staff members had nothing to do. They did it diligently. Two of them were promoted.

Deepak grew thinner. His hair began to grey at the temples. He developed a habit of laughing at inappropriate moments — during meetings, on the telephone with journalists, once during a fire drill — which his colleagues attributed to stress and which Deepak attributed to the fact that he had finally understood the joke, and the joke was that there was no joke, and that was the joke.

In June, the Prime Minister announced the Department’s dissolution during a press conference about railway infrastructure. The Department had, he said, “achieved its core objectives” and its functions would be “absorbed into existing governmental frameworks,” which meant that no one would be responsible for honesty anymore, which was, Deepak reflected, at least an honest description of the situation, though no one seemed to notice.

Sir Humphrey sent a brief note. It read: “My congratulations on a successful tenure. The Department accomplished precisely what it was designed to accomplish, which was nothing, in a manner that could not be criticized, because criticizing it would have required the kind of honesty the Department existed to prevent. You should be proud.”

Deepak read the note twice. He placed it in his outgoing tray, which was also his recycling bin. He packed his things into a cardboard box — a framed photograph of his parents, a stress ball shaped like a globe that someone had given him as a joke, three pens, and a copy of Regulation 1(a) that he had pinned to his wall on his first day, when he had still believed that words meant what they said.

He carried the box to the lift. The Victorian gentleman watched him go. The building was quiet. It was a Tuesday in June — the Department had begun on a Tuesday and now it ended on one, which felt like the kind of symmetry that a better writer would call meaningful and a civil servant would call coincidental and Sir Humphrey would call irrelevant. Outside, London went about its business, which was also a form of organized dishonesty, but at least it was honest about it, or at least it didn’t pretend to have a Department dedicated to proving otherwise.

Deepak stepped out into the street. The air smelled like exhaust and rain. Across Whitehall, a man in a suit was giving a statement to a television camera. The man was saying that the government’s new economic strategy was “bold,” “transformative,” and “unprecedented.” None of these things were true. The journalist was writing them down. Several people walking past glanced at the camera and then looked away, the way you look away from something you’ve already seen too many times to find interesting.

Deepak set his box on a bench. He sat beside it. He took out the stress ball and squeezed it, watching the continents distort under his fingers — Europe flattening, Africa stretching, the whole world going briefly, satisfyingly wrong.

Then he laughed. Not the inappropriate laugh of the past few months, the one that came out sideways and frightened his colleagues. A real laugh. A laugh that started in his stomach and came up through his chest and out into the London air, where it mixed with the exhaust and the rain and the sound of the man on the television saying things that weren’t true.

Because the thing was — the thing Deepak understood now, sitting on his bench with his box and his stress ball and his greying temples — the Department of Honesty had been the most honest thing the government had ever done. Not because it had produced honesty. It hadn’t. But because its failure was the truth. The impossibility of institutional honesty was itself the honest answer to the question the Department had been created to ask. The system couldn’t be honest because the system was the lie, and the lie was the system, and pointing this out was the one thing the system couldn’t permit, which proved the point, which couldn’t be admitted, which proved it again.

It was, Deepak thought, the most beautiful piece of circular reasoning he had ever encountered. And he had encountered it from the inside, which was the only vantage point from which you could see that the circle had no inside, which was itself the point.

He sat on the bench for a long time. The man on the television finished his statement. A pigeon landed on Deepak’s box and looked at him with the blank, unbothered expression of a creature that had never been asked to reconcile competing regulatory frameworks. Deepak envied the pigeon. The pigeon did not envy Deepak. This seemed, on balance, correct.

Eventually he stood up. He picked up his box. He walked to the Tube station. He went home. He made a cup of tea. He sat at his kitchen table and opened his laptop and began typing his resignation letter, which was technically unnecessary since the Department no longer existed, but which he felt compelled to write because the Department had taught him, if nothing else, that the only appropriate response to a purposeless institution was a purposeless document.

“I resign,” he wrote, “because the Department of Honesty has taught me that honesty in government is not a goal that has yet to be achieved. It is a contradiction in terms. The Department was the proof. I was the control group. The experiment is over. The results are conclusive. I am going to do something honest for a living. I don’t yet know what this will be, but I am confident it will not involve regulations.”

He sent the letter to Sir Humphrey. Sir Humphrey did not reply. The letter was filed. It was not released to the public.

Regulation 1(b).