Fear has been the watchword of Westminster this week, as nervy ministers check to see whether they have survived the cull. Their civil servants meanwhile have had no such troubles, able to wait in their Whitehall offices to comfort, console or congratulate their political masters and listen to yet more interminable farewell speeches from those unceremoniously axed.
One departure that has cheered some mandarins was Michael Gove’s switch from the Cabinet Office to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The iconoclastic Aberdonian has blown the winds of change through the corridors of power since his appointment two years ago – hardly surprising in light of his comments that ‘the senior civil service survives and prospers, insulated from responsibility for their actions, while the projects they’re supposed to be managing fail and fail again.’
Gove’s mission to make the Sir Humphreys of Whitehall accountable culminated in June’s much-vaunted ‘Declaration of Government Reform’ under which ‘all senior appointments to public competition by default’ will be ‘advertised in such a way as to ensure the widest pool of applicants.
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