Quotes About Whitehall

Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure and, second, everybody keeps their heads down focused on the particular and they ignore the system.

Churchill was so overweight that in 1942 he had to have a new desk installed in his Cabinet war rooms beneath London's Whitehall because he could not fit behind the previous one.

Churchill insisted that the Government stayed in Whitehall throughout the Blitz. 'Mr Churchill took the view', recorded Thompson, 'that it was essential that they took at least the same chances as the remainder of the population of London.

Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.

not required to stay late in the Whitehall area, I used, as a general routine, to come straight back from duty to a nearby pub, dine there, then retire to bed with a book. At that period the seventeenth century particularly occupied me, so that works like Wood's Athenae Oxonienses or Luttrell's Brief Relation opened up vistas of the past, if not necessarily preferable to one's own time, at least appreciably different. These historical readings could be varied with Proust.

In Whitehall that evening, Sir Edward Grey, standing with a friend at the window as the street lamps below were being lit, made the remark that has since epitomized the hour: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

As controlling officer, Bevan would become the mastermind of wartime deception, overseeing a worldwide web of deceit and mystification from the underground warren beneath Whitehall known as the Cabinet War Rooms.

The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.

Getting money out of Whitehall and down to the town hall is also essential if we are going to address the crisis of confidence - and alienation - in our politics.

You're just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don't trust me and I don't trust you.

For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.

The impetuous creature--a pirate--started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall.

The weekly meeting of permanent secretaries takes place in the boardroom of the Cabinet Office overlooking Horse-guards' Parade. As the senior civil servants in charge of each of the main Whitehall departments, they meet, in theory, to co-ordinate government policy. In practice they also sometimes co-ordinate resistance to government policy.

In an age of globalisation, investment and good jobs increasingly flow to cities and regions with distinctive strengths and specialisms. These cannot be built up from Whitehall. They require local expertise, knowledge and dedication.

the Controller, blond, fattish, and a little bald, lunching tête-à-tête with the head of the Export Department, one of the few other permanent Civil Servants in the Control. In their neat, black suits, and with their serious, aloof expressions, they contrived to bring into their incongruous surroundings an indefinable atmosphere of Whitehall.

Lovat liked and detested London at the same time. He loathed the poverty that was all around and hated the smug indifference towards it from so many of the people he had to work with. He thought of Mrs Litvinov, a woman without two brass tacks to rub together, but more capacity for kindness than anyone very much in Whitehall.  Mrs Litvinov and her kind ought to run the country, he thought. And what a better country it might be.

I have yet to meet a servant of Whitehall that did not have a serpent's smile. Men with power have much to lose, and will do much to hold on to it should be threatened.