Civil service

Having written here at least once before that Boris Johnson is the heir to Blair, my first thought on the Prime Minister’s tax-to-spend announcement on the NHS and social care is a petty one: I told you so. The striking thing about making the Boris-Blair comparison is how resistant some people are to it. Among Bozza fans on the Leave-voting right, there is often fury at the suggestion that their man, the hero of Brexit, is anything like the Europhile they used to call ‘Bliar’. On the left, there is an almost pathological determination to believe that a Tory PM must, by definition, be a small-state free-marketeer intent on starving and

The fallout from David Davis’s intervention in the Alex Salmond affair is all about the messages. The texts which the veteran Tory says he was given by a ‘whistleblower’ contain disturbing conversations between senior SNP and Scottish Government staffers. They raise questions about party involvement in a government investigation, the alleged ‘interference’ of Nicola Sturgeon’s chief of staff, and what the First Minister knew and when. The motivations behind these exchanges will be picked over by those convinced Salmond was the victim of a conspiracy, those convinced the Scottish Government fouled up but had good intentions, and a small smattering of Scots patiently waiting for the Holyrood inquiry to put

It should come as no surprise that Britain’s city centres remain, in the words of CBI chief Carolyn Fairbairn, ‘ghost towns’, and nor is it a shock to hear a civil service union boss shoot down Boris Johnson’s plea for public sector workers to head back to the office. Safety first, said the union man, echoing the caution of his teaching counterparts. As Trevor Kavanagh wrote in the Sun last week, Britain is ‘a scaredy-cat nation of masked hypochondriacs who won’t leave home for fear of dropping dead’. A poll last month bore this out, revealing that while two thirds of workers in France, Spain and Italy were back at

Boris Johnson does not get everything wrong. The appointment of Simon Case to be head of the civil service at such a young age is bold and imaginative. Those who have observed his performance in senior roles all seem to regard him highly. But there could be two problems, both related to his youth: he has never run a large organisation and he has never really experienced failure. By the time that most officials and politicians reach his level of seniority, they usually know what is meant by ‘after such knowledge, what forgiveness.’ They are aware that what goes up can also come down; that an idea which, on the

Boris Johnson has responded to the resignation of Mark Sedwill, the now former Cabinet Secretary. The full text of The Prime Minister’s handwritten note is below Dear Mark, Over the last few years I have had direct experience of the outstanding service that you have given to the government and to the country as a whole. You took over as Cabinet Secretary in tragic circumstances, and then skilfully navigated us politicians through some exceptionally choppy water: a change of premiership, an election, then Brexit, followed by the crisis of Covid-19, where you were instrumental in drawing up the plan the whole country has by now followed effectively to suppress the

Thirteen years ago, when John Reid became Home Secretary, he declared the ministry he presided over ‘not fit for purpose’. He was talking about border control but he might well have been referring to the department in general. When Theresa May became PM, things at the Home Office went from bad to worse. Her paranoid style as PM, developed as a survival mechanism when she was Home Secretary, was disastrous. The Windrush debacle, the most shameful example of government dysfunction in recent times, was a sign that change was long overdue. And yet this chaotic department, riven with internal feuds and a lack of accountability, now has a gargantuan task

In my 37 years in the Diplomatic Service, I neither witnessed nor experienced what I considered to be bullying.  There were senior officials who took regular pleasure in finding fault with a cutting remark. Others swore like troopers. I was the speechwriter to three Foreign Secretaries. One of them told me, with a sardonic laugh, that my latest draft was ‘as useful as a dead fish’.  But never in a month of Sundays did I think any of this to be bullying. The Foreign Office had exacting standards and you expected to be held to them. Still less was it grounds for complaint if the minister rejected your advice, even

The fundamental issue revealed by the resignation of the Home Office’s Permanent Secretary Sir Philip Rutnam is the yawning gap between what Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings want post-Brexit UK to be on January 1, 2021, and what senior civil servants think is deliverable. The PM and his chief aide want to have a fully functioning new immigration system by then, whereas officials fear there’s not enough time. Johnson and Cummings argue the police should be able to keep us safe if we are no longer part of European Arrest Warrant system. Officials can’t concur. Downing Street thinks we can ward off pandemics if we withdraw from the EU’s Early

There are a handful of big things to watch out for following Sir Philip Rutnam’s resignation as Home Office Permanent Secretary: Whether in laying out his case for constructive dismissal, evidence emerges that makes it impossible for Priti Patel to remain as home secretary. Whether other permanent secretaries and senior civil servants show solidarity with Rutnam, thus making it harder for Dominic Cummings to reform how they and civil servants support the Government, and harder for him to streamline the centre of government and the Cabinet Office. What the soon-to-be-published independent report into the scandal of the deportation of Windrush immigrants says about the competence of the Home Office and