Theresa May, you may have read, is fed up with obsequious civil-servants and their ticky-box ways. ‘From the officials’ point of view, what they owe to the minister, and what the minister expects, is the best possible advice,’ she tells Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth in The Spectator Christmas issue. ‘Don’t try to tell me what you think I want to hear,’ she added. ‘I want your advice, I want the options. Then politicians make the decisions.’
Sound stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. The trouble is, civil servants who’ve dealt with May suggest the Prime Minister doesn’t practise what she’s preaching. ‘Theresa May is more the type who says “Who was that person in the meeting who said something I didn’t agree with? Don’t want to see them again,”‘ confides one ex-senior official, who wishes to remain nameless, natch. ‘Politicians always say they want people to speak openly with them but it is almost always balls,’
It’s well-known that May has very small, tight circle of trusted advisers. Or, as one source tells Mr S, she ‘commands from a smaller bunker than Gordon Brown¹. Attacking civil servants might make a good headline, one official added, ‘marks her out as developing excuses very early in her Prime Ministerial career.’
Watch this space — Theresa May vs Whitehall is shaping up to be the fight of 2017, and it will be nasty.
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