Thomas Jones (civil servant)

Thomas Jones, CH (27 September 1870 – 15 October 1955) was a British civil servant and educationalist, once described as "one of the six most important men in Europe", and also as "the King of Wales" and "keeper of a thousand secrets". Jones served as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet for nearly twenty years, under four different Prime Ministers.

Quotes

• Where was Michael Collins during the Great War? He would have been worth a dozen brass hats.
  • Letter to Bonar Law (24 April 1921), quoted in Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Volume III: Ireland 1918–1925, ed. Keith Middlemas (1971), p. 55

• Politically I was an "inevitable gradualist", basically rather to the left of the Prime Ministers, but with a faith free from any dogmatic finality or Utopian perfection. I had no credal difficulty in serving each Minister in turn; we were all infected with Liberalism. I had all the influence I could wield; the only limit was my own inadequacy. By tradition I was a Welsh radical nonconformist, by temperament I was a civil servant, law-abiding, a believer in ordered progress. I believed a little in each of the three Parties, more in the Left than in the Right—"a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley".
  • 'Introduction', A Diary with Letters, 1931–1950 (1954), p. xxiii

Quotes about Thomas Jones

• I am a Tory P.M., surrounded with a Tory Cabinet, moving in Tory circles. You don't let me forget or ignore the whole range of ideas that normally I should never be brought up against if you were not in and out of this room. You supply the radium... you have such an extraordinary width of friendships in all classes, and so many interests that through you I do gather impressions of what is being thought by a number of significant people whose minds I should not know, at any rate so well, but for your help. I think every Tory P.M. ought to have someone like you about the place.
  • Stanley Baldwin, remarks to Thomas Jones (17 January 1929), quoted in Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Volume II: 1926−1930 (1969), pp. 167-168

• He is the liberal conscience of the party.
  • Winston Churchill, quoted in Keith Middlemas, 'Introduction', Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, Volume I: 1916–1925 (1969), p. xii

• Diary with Letters by Thomas Jones (1954), formerly assistant secretary to the cabinet, is incomparably the best source for the appeasers.
  • A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (1965), p. 616