Our uncivil service

HM’s Civil Service has become a leftie pressure group, growing more and more politicised and pari passu incompetent. Hounding Tory politicians, ideally out of office, has become their main passion in life.

When they smell blood, they close ranks and pounce like a pack of dogs on a wounded boar. Their most recent casualty, Deputy PM Dominic Raab, can testify to their burgeoning political power, boosted by expert interaction with the likeminded press.

Just to think that HM’s Civil Service used to be an exemplary institution. It served the Crown and its government with cold, ruthless efficiency untainted by political afflatus.

I’m sure few civil servants were ever apolitical personally. But collectively, the Civil Service certainly was. Ministers from different parties came and went, but their ministries kept ticking over thanks to the people who always stayed in place until they retired, gold watch, sometimes knighthood, in hand.

Though they defined their lives by the duty of service, they’d never use such highfalutin words to describe what they did. Their patriotism was as fierce as it was tacit. Not for them demonstrative hand-over-heart, eyes-to-flag patriotism – proclaiming their love of Britain was as unthinkable to them as proclaiming their love of breathing.

They were Britain and Britain was them. That was all there was to it, it went without saying, now let’s get back to work.   

Those mandarins were mechanics of government, not its creators or designers. Most of them – in the distant past, all of them – received excellent education at a top public school first, Oxbridge second.

Such people didn’t pull rank, not even in the army. Their equality of background trumped their inequality of position. When Major Stirling came up with the idea of an SAS, he could barge into a field marshal’s office and pitch it to him with easy familiarity: the great man used to be a shooting companion of Stirling’s father.

In the past, the Civil Service was the backbone of the country, not to say its whole skeleton. And look at it now.

Their educated accents have gone the way of their educated minds. The Civil Service has become the microcosm of everything wrong with the country. It seems to be hellbent on acting as an extension of the Labour Party, its embodiment and a conduit for its powerlust.

That came to the fore in the runup to the Brexit referendum, when our civil servants, Remainers almost to a man, did all they could to keep Britain in the EU. They were plugged into the pan-European network of bureaucrats whose corporate loyalty to themselves superseded their loyalty to their national governments.

When Britons voted for Brexit, in greater numbers than they ever had voted for anything else, the mandarins and other fruits were enraged: their power wasn’t boundless after all. But it was still significant enough for them to stick one crowbar after another into the spokes of the Brexit wheel. There was much bureaucratic rigamarole involved in that complex withdrawal, and the mandarins used every snag they could to undermine it.

Then came Boris Johnson who won a landslide election under the slogan of Let’s Get Brexit Done. That by itself was a slap in the mandarins’ face. But then Johnson went ahead and did what he had promised: he got Brexit done.

Our new, politicised Civil Service took that as a declaration of war. Working hand in glove with the ‘liberal’ media, the mandarins began targeting one Tory politician after another. They’d leak stories of the slightest indiscretions, and the media would then blow them up into career-ending scandals.

Johnson’s closest adviser Dominic Cummings, the architect of the Brexit campaign, was torn to pieces. Then Johnson himself fell, for having dared to eat a piece of cake at a party that shouldn’t have been held during Covid. That was ill-advised, but at worst a misdemeanour, nowhere near a felony.

Johnson was never my cup of vodka, but credit where it’s due: he did manage to break through the barriers our corrupt Civil Service was trying to put up in the way of Brexit. And he was the first Western leader to pledge assistance to the Ukraine following Russia’s bandit raid.

Never mind – the leftie rabble made him choke on that cake. And then Tory ministers began to fall like overripe apples off a tree. In no particular order: Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Michael Gove, Nadhim Zahawi, Gavin Williamson – and now Dominic Raab.

They are all very different political animals, but you win no prizes for guessing what they all have in common. Correct: all are variously passionate Brexiteers.

Raab was undone by mounting claims of bullying. Apparently, he’d rebuke civil servants so strongly that they were afraid to enter his office. Now, I was once introduced to Mr Raab long ago, when he was a lowly backbencher, and he struck me as a pleasant young man, if not without a layer of steel underneath.

Yet I realise how hard it must have been for him to remain pleasant when, as Justice Secretary, he found his staff consistently sabotaging his initiatives. Instead of finding a well-oiled, smoothly running mechanism at Justice, he found Machiavellian intrigue, backbiting and surreptitious sedition.

I can’t blame him if he indeed raised his voice once or twice. I wouldn’t even blame Mr Raab if he had relied on his karate mastery (he has a third-dan blackbelt) to vent his frustration, although I realise violence has no place in an office.

Yet he did nothing of the sort. A few stern words, that was all. But it was enough for his subordinates to leak and embellish the news to the BBC, The Guardian and other volunteer PR departments of the Labour Party. The rest was their business, and they know it well. A molehill was turned into a mountain of dung, and Raab had to go.

Now, I don’t have it in me to be passionately attracted to any politician, even if I happen to agree with his politics. But I am passionately attracted to the British constitution, and it hurts me to see it grossly abused, if not yet completely destroyed.

A civil service assuming enough political power to oust any Cabinet minister constitutes such an abuse. It’s not our mandarins’ remit to provide ammunition for fanatical Labour savages like Deputy Leader Rayner who doesn’t mind screaming “Tory scum!” in Parliament. And it’s certainly not their remit to impose their own agenda on Britain.

Civility has gone out of our Civil Service. The backbone of British politics now suffers from a bad case of scoliosis.

P.S. Labour is running an ad campaign directed against the prime minister personally. A typical ad shows his photograph and says: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”

So far the PM hasn’t dignified that sort of stuff with a response, and he may be right. But as an ex-adman I’d love him to retaliate with ads saying, for example: “Do you believe women can have penises? Keir Starmer does.”