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Civil Service reform is in the air. It has been for most of the time since the late-1960s when I first took an interest in Whitehall. Now it comes with the whiff of sulphur that accompanies nearly all the frequent mentions of the name Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s gifted but seemingly permanently enraged chief of staff. He is reported as saying “a hard rain” is going to fall on the Civil Service. Already the post of national security adviser has been politicised in the Washington manner.

I’ve been keen on Whitehall reform for about half-a-century, since the Fulton report of 1968, the last big inquiry into the Civil Service. But this latest attempt worries me deeply for two reasons. With every scrap of intellectual and nervous energy required to get the country through Covid and its aftermath, is this really the moment to attack and demoralise the state’s central instrument for getting things done? And vendetta is always a deeply undesirable motivation. It usually dooms its wielder to frustration and eventual failure.

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