Do You Have an Appointment?

In the eyes of many, the amusing Sir Humphrey Appleby, portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne in the BBC series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, represents the quintessential public servant: cool, calm, and firmly in control. But how does a smug deputy minister — the one who knows where all the political bodies are buried — actually come to have a job in the first place? It’s the Byzantine workings of this world that Christopher A. Cooper tries to explain in At the Pleasure of the Crown: The Politics of Bureaucratic Appointments.

Cooper, who teaches public management at the University of Ottawa, acknowledges that the comings and goings of high-ranking administrators can seem “frivolous and unimportant,” yet he believes appointments are an issue of “paramount importance” for Canadians. “Understanding change over the past hundred years in the relationship between...