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Sir David Serpell was an outstanding civil servant. He was the founding first Permanent Secretary of the Department of the Environment in 1970 and went on after retirement to join the main board of British Rail and to produce the Serpell report on the railways in 1982. A man of wit and erudition who regarded the Civil Service as a vocation, Serpell was alert to the potential for conflicting pressures and divided loyalties in his role as he saw Labour and Conservative government ministers come and go. He readily admitted the accuracy of some moments in the acclaimed 1980s television series Yes Minister — later Yes Prime Minister — in which the civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby attempted to get the better of his often short-lived political masters. David Radford Serpell was born in Plymouth in 1911. He was brought up in the... [read full story]
