As for Sir Robin, questions about how well he does are out of the question since no official job description exists for the role, let alone performance reviews. The new Labour government, however, has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change all that Sir Robin is due to retire at the end of December. This gives Tony Blair the opportunity to stop and think about just what it needs at the centre of the centre.Sir Robin doubles up as head of the civil service. So he is also notional manager of the Whitehall machine and ethical arbitrator for conscious- stricken colleagues.

The truth is no one ever knows just how well or badly Whitehall’s top people function because no one – except Sir Robin and cronies privately – ever asks. Of course Sir Robin ensures Cabinet papers are printed and that the committees function – look how smoothly the machine has handled the transition to Labour It’s to do with the nature of his job. After 11 years under Thatcher and Major, Sir Robin’s moral antennae do seem somewhat underused. Yet the Cabinet Secretary’s office remains a sleaze-free zone in the conventional senses of money and sex. And don’t imagine that there aren’t opportunities: even bureaucratic power can be an aphrodisiac.The question is one of competence.

Isn’t it to his credit that, chap to chap, the Cabinet Secretary should have believed Aitken, another toff (Eton and Christ Church)?
Alternatively, Sir Robin’s role in the Aitken affair is clinching evidence that, at the very heart of the British state, most nights it’s amateur hour. If the Cabinet Secretary, the impresario of Britain’s still vast intelligence-gathering networks – the man who sees the communications intercepts, who knows just which members of British legations in Paris and Geneva let alone Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are spies – couldn’t have the Aitken story double-checked, then those ornate and expensive Thameside palaces occupied by MI5 and MI6 might as well be flogged off tomorrow.Are we seriously to believe that Sir Robin did not have the wit or the capacity to ask Stella Rimington of the Security Service – on old girl terms you understand – about Jonathan Aitken’s business dealings at home and abroad? It’s not, despite Aitken, a matter of corruption. Sir: Rather than increasing “social misery”, Dutch policy has greatly reduced the damage done by drugs (19 June). This was accomplished by “harm reduction” instead of police, courts and prisons.

The addiction rate in the UK is 163 per cent that of Holland. The UK is addicted to a failed policy that can never succeed.
RANCEFORD GIVENSSan Francisco, California. Among those to whom Jonathan Aitken lied and lied again was Sir Robin Butler, Whitehall’s head prefect

Thank goodness there are some gents left Sir Robin (Harrow and University College) is a toff. I want to install solar panels for electricity production on the house I am about to build. I want to use electricity from the grid in miserable weather conditions. However, I wish to export excess electricity to the grid when the sun shines in my direction All it takes is two-way metering.
The technology exists It is not uncommon practice in many European countries.