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Analyses Last Updated: Feb 6, 2024 - 2:52:06 PM


The battle with the Blob
By James Heale, Spectator, 03 June 2023
Jun 3, 2023 - 2:19:56 PM

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Most prime ministers fall out with the civil service at some point. David Cameron attacked the ‘enemies of enterprise’; Tony Blair spoke of ‘the scars on my back’ from battling the public sector. But the premiership of Boris Johnson brought relations to a new low, with prorogation and partygate fuelling paranoia on both sides. Under Rishi Sunak, tensions have been reignited by Dominic Raab’s resignation and the Cabinet Office’s attempt to hand over Johnson’s pandemic diaries to the Covid inquiry.

For some Conservatives, the mandarins involved in these dramas are the embodiment of ‘the Blob’. The etymology of this term shows how Tory criticisms of the civil service have changed throughout their time in office. Originally ‘the Blob’ was deployed by Michael Gove’s allies to ridicule unions, teachers and councils unwilling to accept parent-driven change. The term now refers to a much more partisan and activist group of bureaucrats, seeking to undermine the government of the day.

    It’s easy to see why civil servants might think that they decide the fate of ministers

Such claims are nothing new. Denis Healey was forced to go to the IMF for a bailout in the 1970s after Treasury civil servants gave an exaggerated view of what his policies would do to the public finances. I understand that last year it was Simon Case, the head of the civil service, who wrote Liz Truss a memo telling her to abandon her economic agenda on the grounds that it was causing market chaos. From that moment, her premiership was doomed. It was a civil servant, not a cabinet delegation or opposition leader, who sounded the death knell for Trussonomics.

It’s easy to see why civil servants might think that they decide the fate of ministers. A bullying complaint here, a request for ministerial direction there: some Tories fear the tail is now adept at wagging the dog. Hence talk of Home Office staff going on strike in protest over the Rwanda deportation policy. ‘What’s happening at the Home Office is just another level,’ says one senior Tory source: ‘You don’t go on strike – if you don’t like what the government is doing then just hand in your pass and quit.’ Special advisers complain of ‘civil servants “go-slowing”, where they will come out of a meeting and just say “that won’t work”’.

More common than open obstructionism is inertia; according to a former adviser, there is an ingrained bias towards ‘small c’ conservatism to maintain the status quo in which ‘officials run down the clock when they know a reshuffle is coming’. One former cabinet minister, seeking to make the case for such a change, was met with the words: ‘That may be the minister’s policy but it is not the department’s.’

What about leaking against ministers? One battle-hardened government aide says it doesn’t really come from the civil service, estimating that ‘between 90 to 95 per cent of leaking is still political: spads, MPs, ministers’. Another asks: ‘How many civil servants are sitting down to lunch with journalists at Chez Antoinette [a popular Westminster restaurant]?’ A third points out: ‘We were working on the Rwanda policy for months and it didn’t leak. It shows what happens when you have good officials working on things.’

Ministers’ complaints about the civil service are more likely to relate to the unresponsiveness of the machine than any in-built bias against them. ‘It’s cock-up, not conspiracy,’ says one, who bemoans the lack of institutional memory in his department. Some 14 per cent of officials either moved ministries or left the civil service last year, the highest level of churn in at least a decade. This is encouraged by the pay structures in Whitehall, where the way to get ahead is to move from job to job to tick the boxes necessary for promotion and climb the ladder faster.

This leads to a split between the centre and the periphery. Those designing policy in Whitehall move on quickly, but those delivering it on the ground in agencies can become bed-blockers, resistant to change and making it difficult to shake up teams. There is often a not-always-unjustified assumption that the policy will be abandoned in about 18 months’ time. Again, hardly a new tactic. Peter Hennessy, a long-time watcher of the civil service, remarked as far back as 1989 that ‘like the Russian Army, they wait for the snow and time to take care of the invader’.

For all the talk of a sustained Tory ‘war’ on the civil service, the overall headcount is back up to pre-austerity levels. Annual dismissals have fallen by a quarter in the past five years. The last serious attempt to reform  it was made by Francis Maude, David Cameron’s minister for the Cabinet Office. His 11 successors have averaged nine months each. His plans for ministers to hand-pick staff for their private offices were dropped by Theresa May in 2016.

Now in the Lords, Maude has been given one last bite at the cherry, having been appointed by Johnson in July last year to lead a review into civil service governance. But major reform is not expected to be a Sunak priority this side of an election. ‘Now is not the time for big civil service reform because you’d do nothing else,’ says one aide.

Tory activists are certainly concerned. Polling for ConservativeHome shows that 90 per cent of party members believe the civil service is working against them. There are those, such as the ex-Tory chairman Jake Berry, who think it’s now time to ‘break up’ Whitehall and ‘politicise the upper echelons of the civil service’ – calls which are likely only to grow if the Tories lose power next year. One backbencher says of switching mandarins for handpicked appointees: ‘It would be like Brexit: we’d make mistakes but at least they would be our own.’

Labour’s reform plans focus less on efficiency and more on standards. Angela Rayner has pledged to turn the ministerial code from a political document interpreted by the prime minister into a set of legal rules with an ‘Integrity and Ethics Commission’ deciding whether to punish ministers for a serious breach. So: yet another arm’s-length body to decide the fate of government ministers. This is about the only comfort Tories can draw from the situation – that the Blob remains stronger than ever and waiting for a Labour government to ensnare.


Source:Ocnus.net 2023

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