BOY ON A BICYCLE

Hayden Phillips was born in 1943. After attending Cambridge and Yale universities, he joined the Home Office in 1967. In 1974 he became Principal Private Secretary to Roy Jenkins with whom he went to Brussels in 1977 when Jenkins became President of the European Commission. Returning to the Home Office in 1979 he served in the Police Department (he was at the Iranian Embassy Siege for its six days) and then as head of the Immigration and Nationality Department. In 1986 he moved first to the Cabinet Office and then to the Treasury from which he was appointed in 1992 to be the first Permanent Secretary of what has become the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. In 1998 he became the first non-lawyer to head the Lord Chancellor's Department. He retired from the Civil Service in 2004.
Since then he has had a variety of professional roles. In the world of culture he has served as Chairman of the National Theatre and of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art. He has worked in the City joining the Boards of various companies and at Clarence House for the Prince of Wales on his charities. In 2006/7 he was asked to recommend changes to the Funding of Political Parties. From 1997 until 2021 he and his wife, Laura, had a working farm in Wiltshire where he was a Deputy Lieutenant for 10 years. He is believed to be the only serving Permanent Secretary who has played Sir Humphrey Appleby before a paying audience and he has appeared in two films - as Colonel Dent in Jane Eyre(2011) and as Spectre Agent No 4 in No Time To Die (2021), in which he dies on screen.
Currently he is the Independent Reviewer of the Rulings of the ASA, and Chairman of the Wellington Collection Management Committee and of the Salisbury Cathedral Fabric Committee.