Sir Richard Clive Mottram (born 23 April 1946) is a former British civil servant, who retired in 2007 from his most recent senior post as Permanent Secretary, Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the Cabinet Office.
He has served on the boards of a number of private and public sector organisations, including chairing the boards of Amey PLC from 2008-17 and of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) from 2008-2014. He was a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation from 1996-2019 and served on its Council of Management. He was a Visiting Professor in the department of government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from 2008-21. He is chair of the advisory board of the LSE's foreign policy think tank (LSE IDEAS) and lectures on its Executive Masters course and other LSE courses. He is a trustee of the Royal Anniversary Trust, which oversees The Queen's Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education.
Education and early career
Mottram was educated at King Edward VI Camp Hill School in Birmingham. He entered the central government civil service in 1968 aged 22 with a first class degree in International relations from Keele University. From 1975 until 1977, he served in the Defence and Overseas Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. He was then the secretary of two study groups on the rationale for and system options for a successor to the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent which led subsequently to the decision to adopt Trident. He was then appointed private secretary to the permanent under secretary, MOD: Sir Frank Cooper. From 1982 to 1986, he was private secretary to a succession of Secretaries of State for Defence - John Nott, Michael Heseltine and the late George Younger. He was Heseltine's Private Secretary at the time of his resignation in 1986 over the Westland affair.
In 1985, as private secretary to Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, he was a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Clive Ponting, who was later acquitted of an offence under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 for passing information to Labour MP Tam Dalyell about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war. When asked whether answers to parliamentary questions should be truthful and not deliberately ambiguous or misleading, there was a long silence before he replied: "In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth".
From 1986 to 1989, he was the Under-secretary responsible for the defence programme, and from 1989 to 1992, the Deputy Secretary with responsibilities for UK defence policy and strategy, and defence relations with other countries at the time of the end of the Cold War. He was the architect of the "Options for Change' Defence Review.
Multi-purpose Permanent Secretary
After this, in 1992, he was appointed as a Permanent Secretary, first at the Office of Public Service and Science in the Cabinet Office. His responsibilities there included public service change, Civil Service management questions, and science and technology policy and the science budget.
In 1995, he became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, where he worked on, among other things, the Labour Government's Strategic Defence Review.