Once, the Civil Service was viewed as the omniscient, omnipotent embodiment of the Establishment: a mandarin class par excellence. Sir Humphrey Appleby and his real-life equivalents could run rings round their ministers, rule their Whitehall dominions unencumbered and command fear and respect from their underlings.
Those halcyon days now seem like a distant memory. In the twentieth-first century, the civil service increasingly seems unable to even perform its essential duties properly: less Rolls-Royce and more Reliant Robin. Poorly-managed public projects from the Ajax tanks to NHS supercomputer have wasted billions, while the likes of Sir Philip Barton and Sir Matthew Rycroft have produced countless gaffe-filled select committee appearances.
Such blunders are perhaps encapsulated in the form of Simon Case, Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service. Since being appointed to these roles in September 2020 he has been engulfed in a near-constant succession of crises and scandals. Greybeards in Whitehall shake their heads in bemusement. Where, they wonder, is the fleetness of foot that his predecessors demonstrated? He was, after all, the youngest Cabinet Secretary at the time of appointment since 1916 – and one of the least experienced too. Not for nothing did today’s Times note:
Mr Sunak needs a Cabinet Secretary with the authority to ensure that standards are maintained throughout Whitehall. He should ask himself whether Mr Case – who was recruited to the job by Mr Johnson’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, despite lacking the expected credentials, and who was present at all the debacles of the Johnson and Truss regimes, and had to recuse himself from the inquiry into lockdown parties in Downing Street – is really capable of providing the robust advice he needs.
His supporters will argue that many of these crises are not of his own making: it was not Case’s fault that he served under Boris Johnson, arguably the most scandal-riddled premier since Lloyd George.
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