Cummings' dog training classes

The Telegraph reports on a planned reform of the higher levels of the civil service. We don't know what working relationship has developed between the PM, Dominic Cummings and Mark Sedwill over the past four months or so, but the fact that he still retains the triple crown of National Security Adviser, Head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary clearly indicates that there is some sort of accommodation. Sedwill's role will be crucial in determining whether civil service reform is just changing the curtains or whether it will materially alter a service that was developed to meet the needs of the first industrial revolution, codified in 1870 by the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, and has remained essentially the same since.

The story attributes to Dominic Cummings that 

He has already made it clear in private that he will no longer stand for a culture in which it is seen as acceptable for senior officials to go on holiday the day before the announcement of a policy they have been working on for six months. 

Well, I have some considerable experience of that behaviour. They also go on leave (they won't call it holiday) immediately prior to any important decision being taken, any project key date or any critical deadline. Dubai is one of their favourite destinations - just far enough away to prevent vexatious recall, but just cheap enough to not raise questions about their wealth. In fact I'd be astonished if they haven't already developed some sort of civil service club there. It is quite deliberate, and they think it's quite clever. As soon as they know a key date in the project cycle, they book their tickets and get their leave signed-off.

My own attitude to civil service reform is neither vindictive nor self-defeating. I have a cousin who cannot control his dog; he holds a senior post, is a qualified lawyer, a good husband and decent father but the dog is in charge, to the extent that it has had to be fitted with a muzzle. It can never be let off the lead and is unsocialised with anyone outside the family. I see the civil service as like a dominant dog - capable of great affection, with the potential of great loyalty and selfless service and duty, but which will be fulfilled only when it recognises that it is not the master, but the dog. For dogs, it is only having a master that brings true happiness.

I wish Mr Cummings every success.  

Mandarin boss Sly Sedwill confuses with false equivalents

Sly chief mandarin Mark Sedwill is feeling a little public heat against his too-powerful central Statist mandarinate. Dominic Raab's boss Oliver Robbins in particular was excoriated by MPs frustrated that parliamentary democracy is being trumped by Sly Sedwill's unelected pro-EU consiglieri and are saying so openly for the first time.

Of course, as a diligent civil servant unable to answer back at criticism, the first thing Sly Sedwill does is write a letter to the Times warning critics of the mandarins to 'back off'. Or what? An invitation to journalists to the Cabinet Office building, where a forensic scientist and a team armed with electric bone-saws are waiting?  Remember, it is Sedwill and his cabal who are so cosy with both the EU and the KSA - against this nation's interests. Who exactly do they work for?

Sedwill can't resist raising a false equivalent. MPs and blogs such as this have criticised Robbins and Remoaner mandarins. The Head of HMRC has received a death threat from a nutter. Sedwill lost no time in linking these separate events in creating a false equivalent - “However, the anonymous sources on whose sniping it also draws should be ashamed of themselves, especially in a week when another senior civil servant reported having been threatened because of comments about Brexit implementation. This has to stop". Yep, straight from the Jo Cox school of "Jo was murdered by a raving nutter, therefore everyone who voted Brexit is a murderer". 

How the Hell has our civil service gone from a Rolls Royce to this dreary mediocre cabal of dullards, incompetents and non-achievers? Once Brexit is over, we must turn our attention to the much-needed reform of this failing sector.

Well, our senior armed forces and intelligence figures at least are fighting back. In response to Sly Sedwill's snipey whinge, they wrote their own letter to the Times.

Sir,

Sir Mark Sedwill, the acting cabinet secretary, is wrong (letter, Oct 16). It is not critics of the once great British civil service but members of that service in No 10 who need to cease and desist. Olly Robbins and his defence adviser Alastair Brockbank have serious questions of improper conduct to answer — Brockbank for the now infamous “Kit Kat tapes” on which he was secretly recorded seemingly advocating hoodwinking the 17.4 million Britons who voted Leave while covertly working to lock UK defence and security under EU control after Brexit; Robbins for failing to control him and, it appears, sanctioning the “technical note on external security” of May 24 that echoes the tapes.

Veterans for Britain has just published a full analysis of how the prime minister’s proposals put the autonomy of our armed forces in jeopardy and risk fatally compromising our “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. It is by far the worst aspect of the Chequers deal and hitherto has not been made clear to the British public.

The EU has no business being in defence or security at all. These are either Nato or nation-to-nation matters. The UK should withdraw all proposals to the EU in these areas. The withdrawal agreement and proposed defence treaty would keep the UK under EU power permanently after the transition period. This is not what the people voted for.

Major-General Julian Thompson RM, chairman, Veterans for Britain; Sir Richard Dearlove, former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service; Rear-Admiral Roger Lane-Nott, naval board member VfB; Professor Gwythian Prins, academic board member VfB

Well done chaps. Both barrels and 10 bore to boot. 

Disfunctional mandarins must be culled

You could pretty much stop any 177 bus at random in south London and comb-out a dozen illegals. At least half of them would be Nigerian - overstayers who came on student visas in the nineties and noughties with places in august institutions such as the Imperial College of Law and Business, 14 The Parade, Catford (above Morley's Chicken). The scam was known to just about everybody in the country except, it seems, the mandarins at the Home Office. When faced with a shouty minister demanding deportation targets, instead of random immigration checks on London buses (I promise you, a guaranteed haul with every stop) the muppets deported black Britons from the Caribbean, many of them a damn site more British than I am if you count time served. 

These are the same Home Office muppets that ushered scores of ex-Iraqi tank drivers into the UK because they declared that they were children. As the entire nation shouted 'Ref!' as files of men in their thirties climbed smilingly into luxury coaches those Home Office mandarins asked 'what?' It took two years to admit quietly that most of these swarthy stubbled blokes were in fact adults. 

It takes a certain stubborn stupidity to make errors so gross, so culpable, so utterly mindlessly inane and keep on making them again and again, but the senior civil servants running the Home Office have made a career of it. The minister has had to go, of course, and this is right. But if one of her muppets had explained to her that they would be deporting

... Dexter Bristol, here for 51 years, who died a year after being pushed out of his job as a cleaner and forced into penury for lack of a passport. There’s Gretal Gocan, an 81-year-old NHS nurse and granny who made her life here over decades and is now living in Jamaica, in poverty and isolation from her family, after being refused re-entry in 2010. There’s Winston Jones, a former railway worker evicted from his house shortly after having brain surgery and then presented with a £5,000 bill for his care.

then even Amber Rudd would have cavilled. 

As Brexit has shown, the top ranks of the civil service are in desperate need of root and branch reform. Criteria for promotion and selection for mandarin rank are clearly disfunctional if such pointless, useless muppets continue to be appointed to PUS and second and third tier posts. Ministers deserve more; Amber Rudd deserved more. For Gods sake, let's use Common Sense as a prime candidate criterion, not Common Purpose.