Sir Robin Butler
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 1993
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway is civil servant Sir Robin Butler.
Favourite track: Messiah I Know That My Redeemer Liveth by George Frideric Handel Book: Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy Luxury: A bag of golf clubs and golf balls
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a civil servant. His credentials are impeccable. He won a scholarship to Harrow, graduated from |
| 0:34.6 | Oxford with a double first in classics, and entered the Treasury having come top in |
| 0:38.7 | his exams. Hardly surprising then that he's ended up in charge of the place. |
| 0:43.4 | He was a founder member of the government think tank and private secretary to |
| 0:46.9 | Prime Minister's Heath, Wilson and Thatcher. |
| 0:49.6 | Colleagues say he has the ability to put across unpalatable truths, a gift for which he's probably |
| 0:54.8 | grateful in his present position as Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service. |
| 0:59.6 | He is Sir Robin Butler. |
| 1:02.2 | Is putting across unpalatable truths, Sir Robin Butler. Is putting across unpalatable truth, Sir Robin, a skill you've worked at or |
| 1:06.2 | is it a natural talent you discovered you had early on? |
| 1:09.4 | Well, I didn't know that I was particularly good at it, but it is a thing that civil servants have to do because we support the governments in the carrying out of their policies, but that sometimes means telling them the difficulties about those policies and perhaps the inconsistencies in them. |
| 1:24.0 | So is it a professional problem then that you almost enjoy or are you like the rest of us? |
| 1:29.0 | Do you dread telling somebody something they don't want to hear and do you procrastinate you put it off? |
| 1:34.4 | I don't particularly enjoy it but I can do it if I have to. |
| 1:38.9 | What I enjoy about these problems is analyzing them and coming up with the analysis and presenting |
| 1:44.9 | things to people. It's the intellectual challenge I like. It was apparently Victor |
| 1:49.6 | Rothschild back in the early 70s as head of the first think tank who exploited this |
| 1:54.5 | talent of yours did he send you into bat on sticky wickets because he |
| 1:57.8 | spotted that you were rather good at putting the nasty news across well I don't |
| 2:01.8 | know but he did put me in an extraordinarily |
... |
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