I once had a physics teacher at school, a raving lunatic of a man, who would unleash tirades against people and institutions he disliked. We were putty in his hands, in a way enjoying the distraction rather like amused witnesses to a demented drunk on a train. He always capped his diatribe with the same words, often targetting me because he (rightly) guessed I was an arty type, essentially a lost cause to the world of science: “Stick to Latin, stick to Greek, become a civil servant, work at British Leyland, but don’t waste my time.”

One of the most uninspiring periods of my working life was spent at the Home Office in London – that’s the Ministry of the Interior for the uninitiated. I never thought of myself as a civil servant, of course; I saw myself as an aspiring writer, the day job necessary to pay the bills. I figured I’d be able to go on autopilot at work and then come home ready to hone my “masterpiece”. I told myself I wouldn’t succumb to depression in spite of the relentlessly tedious workload, the countless monotonous meetings to discuss other meetings and the realisation that the civil service is nothing but pin counting with no room for individual innovation. You could read the names of the nominal lower grades at the time – administrative assistant, administrative officer, executive officer – as euphemisms for junior pin counter, middle pin counter, chief pin counter. While the more senior grades – Grade 7, for example – was chief in charge of pin counting etc...

Most staff were extremely depressed. Abuse of the system was widespread. One female member of staff never did a full week’s work during the three years I was there. You could be sure that every Monday or Friday she’d be “sick”. Ironically, she caused so much trouble in the office that we preferred her to be absent. But, infuriatingly, she was one of these pathologically lonely and unhappy people who’d ring in on her days off to complain about everything from noisy (conspiratorial) neighbours through to roadworks in her street. You couldn’t make it up.

We had a flexible working hours system, meaning as long as you were there between the core hours of 10am and 3.45pm you could come and go whenever you wanted. But this too was abused, particularly by the aforementioned member of staff who would swipe in early in the morning only to retreat to a coffee shop across the road. Late in the evening, on the other hand, Miss Conscientious would be found reading a book in the corner of the office, “making up” hours before she went home. The ultimate sanction of dismissal was never an option. I once asked a senior civil servant apropos this member of staff. “What do you have to do to get fired from the civil service, kill someone?” His exact reply was: “Even then you probably wouldn’t be.”

Positions of advantage and disadvantage were institutionalised with little recompense for hard work. Many people chose not to do very much simply because they saw no point. Staff who took on their colleagues’ workload got a pat on the back for their trouble but little else.

Ring any bells? That’s right. I concluded the civil service was a microcosm of the communist system. You have a job for life and the idle knew it and abused it. Incentives were non-existent and wage differentials (unless you got right to the top) were slim. It was like an enormous elephant with sclerosis. But I’m grateful for the experience. Now I know first-hand why communism failed.