The invisible man

Date: 03/04/1997

PROFILING a public figure is never easy and private individuals are even trickier. But writing a pen-portrait of the president of the EU's furtive monetary committee deserves the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

Yet it will be the unassuming Sir Nigel Wicks who will decide, more than any other single individual, whether economic and monetary union (EMU) will get off to a flying start less than two years from now.

While German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jacques Chirac may light the euro's blue touch-paper, Wicks will make sure that the fireworks are bought and the champagne is in the ice-box.

The success of this weekend's informal gathering of EU finance ministers on the Dutch coast, and of the Amsterdam summit in June, will depend on Wicks' work.

And when the time comes for a short list of EMU members to be drawn up next spring, the UK government will hold the EU's rolling presidency. Who will have the British finance minister's ear? One Nigel Wicks.

Nevertheless, this 56-year-old British civil servant is more than private, living in a bureaucratic twilight zone.

Some people may think this is just how it should be. After all, the committee of monetary experts that Wicks chairs has always been notoriously secretive since it advises ministers on sensitive interest-rate, currency and budgetary policies.

However, the day Wicks came out of the shadows and became chief aide to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and then head of the Union's most powerful economic committee, he should have expected just a bit of prying.

But he still seems puzzled by the interest. The UK treasury, where he is the second most decorated civil servant, claims to have no curriculum vitae of the man nor a photograph, and nobody can confirm rumours that he supports south London football club Crystal Palace. Any press enquiries about Wicks are met with a reference to his undersized entry in Who's Who.

“Nobody talks about Nigel,” said an official.

He is wrong, in fact, because they do. But the problem is that even when they do, his colleagues have very little to say.

“Yes, I know Nigel well,” said someone who worked with him at the treasury for three years. But he soon buckled under tough questioning. “People do not really know him,” he confessed. “He spends his entire life jetting around the world.”

Since 1988, Wicks has headed the treasury's department dealing with overseas issues, regularly flying off to meetings of the Group of Seven most developed states, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the monetary committee itself.

“If I had to identify his greatest skill,” said an envious former colleague, “it would be his ability to get to sleep on a plane. He can always appear at a meeting on the other side of the world looking fresh.”

His peers on the monetary committee, who elected him as their president three years ago, offer glowing praise. “Most people consider him to be the best president we have had for many years,” said one normally cynical committee man.

Under Wicks' predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet, many members felt that the panel had lost its way as a technical preparatory group. “[Wicks] does not waste the monetary committee's time like Trichet did with his long euphoric speeches about how we will all save the world with EMU,” said one.

“He runs the committee very efficiently, always considerate but pushing it on to conclusions. He likes to point out that the committee has talked enough and it is time to get something on paper for the ministers. His actions are geared very much towards preparing ministerial meetings.”

The exciting days of European currency realignments of 1992-93, when the monetary committee took a front-line role, are over. Under Wicks, the dull but worthy work of preparing meetings and overseeing the legal transition to the euro has taken over.

In the run-up to the Dublin summit in December last year, the committee's workload became crushing and it has hardly let up since. Only last week, Wicks was obliged to convene a scheduled meeting in Brussels a day early in order to get through the agenda.

In short, Sir Nigel has found his métier.

It was not always the case. “Everyone says Wicks is useless,” said former right-wing minister Alan Clark in his best-selling and candid diaries.

Having served for two enjoyable years as the UK's representative to the IMF in Washington, Wicks was made an offer he could not refuse in 1985. Margaret Thatcher was into her sixth year in power and needed an experienced civil servant to become her principal private secretary.

But his arrival worried Thatcher's senior ministers, who felt that Wicks would not be as tough as his predecessor Sir Robin Butler in standing up to the Iron Lady.

In his memoirs, former Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe claimed that Wicks was too “diffident”. With Butler out of the way, Thatcher's favourite courtiers - her foreign affairs adviser Charles Powell and straight-talking press secretary Bernard Ingham - were unchecked in their power. Wicks became, in Howe's words, only “nominally senior” to these two Eurosceptics.

This turned out to be a low point in an otherwise glittering career.

After grammar school in south London, Wicks went on to Portsmouth College of Technology and then Jesus College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1966. After a seven-year stint at the treasury, he became one of three officials working directly for the prime minister - this time Labour's James Callaghan - in his Downing Street official residence.

Following his time with Thatcher, Wicks returned to the treasury in 1988 and has been there ever since. Sir Nigel - the 'Sir' was conferred five years ago when he became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath - is now second permanent secretary at the treasury.

In plain English, this means that he comes joint second in the finance ministry's pecking order to Sir Terry Burns (knighted in 1983) along with chief economic adviser Sir Alan Budd, who made a late spurt to clinch his knighthood in January.

Since then, Wicks has been the right-hand international man to a clutch of finance ministers - Nigel Lawson, John Major, Norman Lamont and Kenneth Clarke. Within weeks, he may be fulfilling the same role for Labour's Gordon Brown.

He is rated very highly both by Clarke and former colleagues at the treasury.

“He did not have that meretricious side that many people in the treasury have - the implication that they are so important that they do not have the time to say 'hello' because they are so terribly busy. Nigel was not like that at all,” said one.

“He is one of the newer breed of civil servant,” said another. “He is forceful and lively in private and not at all stuffy.”

Wicks' phlegmatic approach to business, which his monetary committee colleagues value, was observed at close hand on 16 September 1992 - the day the pound was ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism under a speculative storm.

“I was there with a group of people watching the screens,” said a former colleague. “I was very struck at how matter-of-fact Nigel was. For him, it was a question of where the monetary committee meeting would be, when it would be and how he would get there.”

Wicks takes the same approach to the single currency.

Coming from a country which is unlikely to participate in the first wave of EMU entrants, he has nevertheless been careful to do his job.

In a rare public appearance, speaking to a European Parliament committee last year, he said: “If the single currency is to go ahead, then we need to make sure that it is done well. As with so many things in the Union, the devil is in the implementation and the detail.”