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The Permanent Government Gets Its Marching Orders

Credit :Yui Mok/PA

There is a comfortable fiction at the heart of British constitutional life. It goes like this: the civil service is a neutral instrument of government, a faithful handmaiden to whichever party the electorate installs in Downing Street, apolitical by design and tradition, serving Crown and Parliament with selfless impartiality. It is a fine myth. Like all good myths it contains a grain of truth. Unlike the best myths, this one has become a fig leaf for something rather less edifying.

The reality, as anyone who has spent time in and around Westminster knows perfectly well, is that the civil service is an organisation like any other. It has its own culture, its own priorities, its own instincts for survival, and its own definition of what constitutes good policy, a definition that does not always coincide with the manifesto of the party in power. The permanent government endures. Ministers come and go. And the permanent government, consciously or not, tends to ensure that the things it considers important persist through the transitions, while the things it considers inconvenient or threatening have a mysterious tendency to get lost in process.

Danny Kruger’s new paper, “Fixing the Centre,” published yesterday, opens with an epigraph from the 1985 Armstrong Memorandum: “The Civil Service as such has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted Government of the day.” It is a bracing quotation precisely because the current state of affairs represents such a thorough departure from it. Kruger’s paper is a serious, detailed, and at points quite startling document. It deserves to be read carefully, not least because it signals that a Reform government would approach Whitehall with something it has never previously faced: a detailed plan drawn up in advance, informed by civil servants themselves.

The consultation that preceded it was extraordinary. Kruger invited serving civil servants to share their experiences anonymously, and the response, he says, was overwhelming. The paper is peppered with their submissions, and they make for uncomfortable reading for anyone who imagines that Whitehall is a well-oiled machine. Officials from HMRC complain that nobody gets sacked, creating a culture of entitlement in which departments exist for the benefit of their staff rather than the public. Officials from DESNZ note that it is “impossible to bring in obviously talented people” without months of HR obstruction. Someone from DSIT simply demands: “Remove the Cabinet Office. Make No10 powerful again.”

The honesty of these submissions matters because it complicates the official narrative. The civil service has spent recent years positioning itself as a guardian of constitutional propriety, a brake on what it tends to call “populist” government. Kruger’s paper cites a lecture by academic Dr Ben Yong, whose views reflected those of certain Whitehall officials, who argued that the civil service might have duties to “the continuity of the state” that are separate from its duty to support incumbent governments, and that officials might legitimately engage in “guerrilla government,” including bureaucratic shirking, leaking and whistle-blowing, if they disapprove of an incoming administration. This is not constitutional propriety. This is a permanent bureaucracy arrogating to itself a democratic veto it has no right to exercise.

The situation worsened this week when the Public and Commercial Services Union debated and passed a motion to counter a “hostile Reform government” with sustained industrial action. Kruger responded bluntly that striking on such grounds would be illegal and those involved would not have jobs to return to. One can see his point. An organisation that plans to go on strike not over pay or working conditions but over the political identity of a democratically elected government has entirely abandoned any pretence of neutrality.

We have, of course, been laughing at this for decades. ‘Yes Minister’ is regarded as perhaps the finest British sitcom ever made precisely because it is devastatingly accurate. Sir Humphrey is not a caricature; he is a documentary subject lightly fictionalised. ‘The Thick of It’ is funnier and darker, but its portrait of an institution that treats elected politicians as an irritating management layer to be managed, delayed, and where possible redirected is not satire but observation. The reason these programmes land is that everyone who has encountered Whitehall at close quarters recognises the creature.

Kruger’s diagnosis of the structural problem is precise. The Cabinet Office, created in 1916 to manage Cabinet business, has since Tony Blair expanded nearly five fold to employ over 11,000 staff, becoming the principal source of authority across Whitehall, to the point that 10 Downing Street appears on the official organogram as a subsidiary unit of the Cabinet Office, listed alongside the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and the Public Inquiry Response Unit. The Prime Minister’s office, in other words, is officially a sub-department of the bureaucracy it nominally directs. If you wanted to design a system that maximised the power of unelected officials relative to elected ministers, you could scarcely do better.

The solution proposed is radical but coherent: abolish the Cabinet Office entirely, replace it with an Office of the Prime Minister led by a powerful Chief of Staff appointed directly by the PM, and a new Department of the Civil Service charged with headcount reduction, AI adoption, and transforming Whitehall’s culture and productivity. Ministers would gain real powers to hire and fire civil servants, including their Permanent Secretaries. Quangos would be brought back into departments or scrapped. The model draws on serious international precedents: Australia’s combined Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which coordinates the whole of government with only 1,000 officials, and Japan’s 2001 reforms, which reduced the number of departments from 22 to 12 after career civil servants had begun running their departments as independent operations, effectively ignoring the Prime Minister’s agenda.

There will be much pearl-clutching. There always is when anyone proposes genuine structural change to the way Whitehall operates. Commentators who have never administered anything more complex than a book club will warn gravely of constitutional chaos, the destabilisation of impartial government, threats to expertise. But consider what has actually happened in those councils now administered by Reform. The expectation, broadcast loudly in the months before the May elections, was that incoming Reform administrations would create administrative mayhem: that senior officers would resign en masse, that services would collapse, that the clash between ideological politics and professional local government management would be catastrophic.

It has not happened. In council after council, a rather different story has emerged. Senior local government officers, many of them experienced professionals with no particular political affiliation, have found the new arrangements more congenial than they feared, and in some cases more congenial than what preceded them. The reason is straightforward: they have political cover. For years, many of these officers knew perfectly well what needed doing. They knew which services were inefficient, which contracts represented poor value, which policies had been captured by pressure groups rather than designed for residents. But they could not act, because to act would have been to invite political controversy, and political controversy was something that councils run by nervous, faction-ridden majorities could not absorb. Reform administrations, with clear mandates and a willingness to take decisions, have in many cases simply let competent officers get on with their jobs. The professionals, it turns out, are rather glad of it.

This insight is central to understanding what Kruger is proposing at national level. The argument is not that the civil service is uniformly obstructionist or that all permanent officials are hostile to democratic governance. Many of them are frustrated, talented people who want to do good work and find the current system actively prevents them. The December 2025 “Storm and Sunshine” paper that preceded this latest document was explicit that beyond the necessary turbulence lay the prospect of a better, more rewarding place to work for officials who genuinely want to serve the public. The problem is structural. An organisation with no real performance management, where promotion is disconnected from results, where DEI coordinators and HR professionals proliferate while operational capacity hollows out, where “policy professionals” who double in number every decade produce no discernible improvement in policy, is not serving anyone well, including the people who work in it.

The proposed headcount reductions in non-operational professions, at least fifty percent in policy, communications and HR, represent a direct challenge to the administrative classes that have expanded so dramatically since 1997. The Government People Group, the civil service’s own HR function, currently employs around 12,000 people for a workforce of 550,000, double the ratio of large private sector organisations. This function would be radically slimmed down and repurposed away from HR management entirely, towards elite talent acquisition.

The pruning of HR is not merely a cost-cutting measure. The human resources profession, as it has evolved in both public and private sectors, has become one of the primary vehicles through which DEI ideology has been institutionalised in organisational life. Recruitment processes have been weighted in ways that disadvantage candidates on grounds unrelated to competence. Promotion decisions have been subject to interventions that undermine meritocracy. The result is both unfair and productivity-destroying: unfair to the candidates excluded on irrelevant grounds, and destructive of the organisational capacity that comes from consistently putting the best people in the right jobs. A civil service that recruits and promotes on merit, pays for performance, and removes those who consistently underperform is not a crueller institution. It is a fairer and more effective one.

The Armstrong principle, invoked at the opening of Kruger’s paper, was never really about the neutrality of the civil service in some abstract sense. It was about democratic accountability. The civil service serves the government of the day because the government of the day has been elected, and in a democracy, election confers legitimacy. When officials arrogate to themselves the right to determine which governments are acceptable and which are not, they are not upholding the constitution. They are subverting it.

A Reform government would inherit a Whitehall that has forgotten this. Kruger’s paper is the most serious attempt yet to remind it.

And just wait until we take a long hard look at the Quangos.