He is probably the only Tory clever, experienced and motivated enough to have another run at it before the next general election. Instead, having created the problem, they are manufacturing the solution: the actual politicisation of the civil service.Īnd so back to Lord Maude, who, having tried several times since 2010 to reform the civil service, now has radical plans to let ministers appoint their own civil servants. Government ministers – with Tory backbenchers screaming for civil service blood – have ample incentive to ignore the idea that dealing more effectively with bullying and harassment might be an answer. “We would have found it quite difficult to win both world wars” with attitudes like these, Lord Lilley sniffed. Civil servants even have “lower expectations of work”, according to David Davis. Oliver Dowden, Raab’s replacement as deputy prime minister, warns against the civil service lowering standards. It goes something like this: now that lazy, incompetent civil servants have hounded Raab from office, ministers face a struggle to get them to do any work. Ministers are now carpet-bombing the media with the next chapter of this story. The idea of a hidden civil service agenda is an archetypal “deep state” trope that for years has been cultivated and amplified by the rightwing media to serve as mood music for this government’s war against the very concept of checks and balances against its power. But even if we had the hilariously short-sighted aim of “bringing down” the government, we don’t have the means or the platform to do any such thing. “Activist” civil servants? The truth is, we’re not that organised. Yet this absurd, toxic take on how the civil service works somehow manages to overlook the vaccine rollout, the cost of living support package and the response to the Ukraine crisis as recent examples, according to the Institute for Government’s 2022 report, of civil servants “working under clear ministerial direction … with a focus on action and making change happen”. The very carefully choreographed narrative from these notable truth-tellers ( brilliantly debunked recently by Simon McDonald, who himself worked under Raab and quickly dismissed the conspiracy theorists) is that the civil service “blob” is hellbent on a campaign to frustrate and undermine government policy. At least, that’s what assorted Raab-fluffers – including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Conservative peer Lord Marland (who told the BBC there was “almost a conspiracy by the civil service”) and the Emperor Palpatine of civil service reform, Francis Maude (more on him in a bit) – are desperately trying to get the public to believe. Or is it you, dear reader, the “ Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” with your declinist, gloomster schadenfreude, bringing the country to its knees?
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