Where have all the grown-ups gone?

Last week 100,000 civil servants from 124 government departments went on strike. This fact prompts a number of questions, not least – who knew there were so many government departments? Also, when was the last time anyone saw that number of civil servants?

Since Covid, the most noteworthy thing about the civil service has been that it has completely inverted its working week. Alongside those members who never turn up to the office, a goodly portion have managed to arrange it so that they spend a couple of days a week at their desk and a five-day stretch at home recuperating. Meaning that last week civil servants finally went back to the office in record numbers only in order to stand outside it and strike.

Perhaps it is inevitable that a workforce so lacklustre would be looking for new reasons to do less. The latest tactic is the return of that most fearsome Whitehall spectre: ‘bullying’.

It’s not just the civil service that likes finding and wielding this tool. The Labour party in opposition clearly hopes that we are getting into a sort of mid-1990s dynamic, whereby they can pick off senior Tories one by one so that the government is permanently on the defensive and gets nothing done. You know the tune. There will be a sleaze allegation here, a bullying allegation there, a bizarre sex-death if they’re lucky. So far Labour have managed to bring the word ‘sleaze’ back because of Nadhim Zahawi and his tax affairs. They are clearly hoping to get the Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, next. The charges against him duly relate to bullying. And now more terrible details have come to light.

Raab, you may remember, already stands accused of picking tomatoes out of his lunch salad and throwing them across the room in a fit of fury.