Will Boris’s Whitehall overhaul work?

Boris Johnson’s big election win means the Tories have taken back control of Parliament. The PM’s majority ensures that he can deliver on Brexit and also push through his party’s agenda for government. One of the more eye-catching policies planned is a shake-up of Whitehall and the British civil service. Without a radical change, policy implementation will flounder. But will Boris’s Whitehall overhaul work? Dominic Cummings, who appears to be the driving force behind these plans, is certainly no fan of Whitehall. In a 2014 blog, he quoted from a TS Eliot poem about the Treaty of Versailles to sum up what he saw as the dismal failure of the civil service to turn policy ideas into action. ‘Are you fed up with the Hollow Men in charge of everything and do you want to change things more than the three party leaders do? I am and I do,’ he wrote.  According to Cummings, the people who work in Whitehall, their education, training, promotion and their inability to cope with the complexity of the modern state and society, or even to understand the tools needed to do that, makes for a recipe for inaction.