Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron: recent British political history is not short of examples of prime ministers who came to office believing the civil service and its top mandarins needed a shake-up to support their modernising vision. Armed with a solid majority and an ambitious agenda of making Brexit a success and “levelling up” the UK, Boris Johnson and his chief aide Dominic Cummings have launched their own attempt to bend Whitehall to their will. Their heavy-handed approach so far, however, risks fostering not efficiency but instability.
The UK civil service is widely admired for its impartiality and professionalism. It is also, according to some ex-ministers and insiders, not accountable enough for its failures and overly hierarchical. Its status as a permanent bureaucracy can lead to inertia, or a sense of superiority over here-today, gone-tomorrow ministers and advisers.
Mr Cummings has two goals. He aims to lead a powerful administration from Number 10 Downing Street whose writ runs across government. That means bringing to heel the permanent secretaries or senior civil servants who head Whitehall departments and the special advisers, or “spads”, hired by ministers to help shape policy. As a fan of Silicon Valley’s disruptive ethos, he also wants to bring freethinking “weirdos and misfits” into government to help it confront rapid social and technological change.
Where Team Johnson’s approach differs from that of predecessors is in the climate of fear it is creating. Unattributed media briefings have named individual officials at the Treasury, Home Office and Foreign Office as being on a “shitlist”. Such talk undercuts officials’ ability to run their departments. Civil servants must be able to disagree with their political masters without fear of reprisals. Since some of the individuals or departments named have been accused of opposing Brexit, there is an element, too, of tribal retribution.
Tensions in the government machine burst into the open with the loss of Sajid Javid as chancellor of the exchequer in a mishandled reshuffle. Mr Javid resigned rather than allow his advisory team to be replaced by a “joint” one with Number 10. Then came reports of trench warfare between home secretary Priti Patel and her permanent secretary, one of those anonymously identified as being in Downing Street’s sights. Mark Sedwill, head of the civil service, wrote a finely crafted letter this week urging civil servants, ministers and, implicitly, Number 10 to stick to established codes of conduct.
Efforts by the Cummings team to bring in unconventional minds as “contractors” also risk undermining the civil service. One, Andrew Sabisky, resigned this month after only a few days in Number 10 when extreme comments he had made on race, gender and eugenics came to light. Though he attended meetings with Mr Johnson, Downing Street declined to confirm how Mr Sabisky was hired or whether he underwent security checks.
Governments have every right to reform the civil service, but the aim should be genuine improvements in management, not over-centralisation. Downing Street must also recognise it has a crucial role to play in choosing ministers based on competence not subservience, matching their skills to their posts, and allowing them time to push through their programmes. Even after a reshuffle, Mr Johnson’s cabinet still looks like one chosen more for its loyalty and Leave-supporting credentials than for real talent. Delivering a bold agenda requires an effective state bureaucracy. But it needs political leadership that is fit for purpose, too.
