I originally drafted this post as the second on Tim Shipman’s book last autumn. Having found and re-read it I have revised it, among other things to go with Jonathan Portes’ appreciation for Sir Jeremy Heywood, the signing of a Brexit agreement, and the outing of the American Friends of the IEA An interesting thought…
Read More #AllOutWar On the InstitutionsThe point’s been well made, notably by
Read More The bureaucratic imperative rules, or maybe just reignsReading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…
Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failureDoes anyone else think Sir Ivan Rogers quit when he did in order to make sure his replacement was someone like Sir Tim Barrow? Rogers’ ostensible explanation for quitting was that his posting was coming up anyway in a couple of months and he wanted to give his successor some time to read themselves in.…
Read More The Rogers LegacySo I got an answer to my FOI request! On the 12th of June, National Savings and Investments disclosed some e-mail regarding the Tories’ fake government mailshot. You can get the dump at the link, and read the related meta here. My original blog posts are here and here. The upshot, as usual with these…
Read More These 9 Government E-Mails I Just Got Disclosed Show Just What a Dick George Osborne Really IsIt looks like the experiment is over. The job of Head of the Home Civil Service is being re-integrated with Cabinet Secretary and No.10 Downing Street PS. There’s also going to be a “CEO” who will perhaps be recruited from the private sector, although no names that aren’t civil servants have been put forward. But…
Read More Viva Blob!I’ve said before that the coalition tends to mistake propaganda methods for policy methods. See this post on Damian McBride’s blog for confirmation. Specifically, Steve Hilton appears to have abolished the No.10 future events grid, taking it to be an infernal machine invented by Alistair Campbell and the civil service, and then been surprised when…
Read More lost in the incomprehensible mazeThis Peter Oborne piece is being read as an insight into a power-struggle between George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith. I think it is more interesting to note that whatever the politics between them, both of them believe things that are completely impossible. This isn’t a fight between two men or two factions, it’s a…
Read More two madmen fighting over which one’s voices are rightHere’s a fascinating post on the Conservative Home Tory Diary from one Paul Goodman, complaining about the fact that No.10 Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood wants to have ministerial special advisers brought into civil service line management. The Awesome Whitehall Blog not yet existing, I’ll explain that a special adviser is a political appointee picked by…
Read More A little more on the Project 2.0 and beyondHere’s a role for a blogger that I don’t think anyone covers. The Whitehall blog. It’s a truism about British journalism, going back to Anthony Sampson if memory serves, that the newspapers cover Westminster politics obsessively but they hardly cover Whitehall at all. When they do, their service is even more conventionalised and less penetrating…
Read More Request for blog