PM poaches prince’s aide, 41, to run the Civil Service
A FORMER aide to Prince William will today be appointed as Britain’s top civil servant.
Whitehall sources last night confirmed that Boris Johnson has picked Simon Case to be the UK’s new Cabinet Secretary.
He will replace Sir Mark Sedwill, who announced he was quitting in June after losing a power struggle with the Prime Minister’s chief aide Dominic Cummings.
Mr Case, 41, will become the youngest Cabinet Secretary in modern times. He will now be expected to help drive through the radical Civil Service reform demanded by Mr Cummings, who has warned a ‘hard rain is coming’ to Whitehall.
But allies dismissed the idea his relative inexperience would make him a pushover for the chief aide. ‘He’s a problem-solver who gets things done,’ said one. ‘He has impressed everyone since he came back.’
Mr Case previously served as private secretary to both David Cameron and Theresa May in No10.
He then appeared to have left the Civil Service fast-track in 2018 after being poached by the Royal Household to become private secretary to Prince William. However, he was brought back on secondment in May this year to the vacant post of permanent secretary at Downing Street to help out with the coronavirus response.
At the time, No10 denied the move was designed to undermine Sir Mark.
But Sir Mark was ousted the following month after behind-the-scenes rows with Mr Cummings. He was handed a peerage and will receive a taxpayer-funded pay-off of almost £250,000.
Mr Case has held a string of top Civil Service jobs, including senior roles at GCHQ and the Northern Ireland Office.
He has little experience of serving in big delivery departments. But unlike Sir Mark, he is trusted by the administration’s Brexiteers as well as the Remainers of Whitehall. Whitehall sources last night insisted that Mr Case had not been ‘lined up’ for Sir Mark’s job.
It is understood he had been intending to return to the Royal Household and did not even apply for the post of Cabinet Secretary initially. Only when the search was widened following a sift of initial candidates, who included several departmental permanent secretaries, did he agree to throw his hat into the ring.
The Prime Minister is said to have told Mr Case he wants him to become ‘my Jeremy Heywood’ – a reference to the legendary former Cabinet Secretary who served as a Whitehall troubleshooter for four prime ministers.
The role of Cabinet Secretary is the most powerful in Whitehall and includes providing the link between Government and the Queen. Sir Mark also controversially held the role of National Security Adviser.
But this will now be filled by the PM’s chief Brexit negotiator David Frost. Mr Case faces an immediate challenge in balancing demands for reform of Whitehall with the need to smooth feathers ruffled by the departure of Sir Mark and four other permanent secretaries this year.
He will also be expected to help oversee the PM’s push to get hundreds of thousands of civil servants back to their desks following the lockdown. The PM has ordered long backlogs in the issuing of key documents like passports and driving licences to be cleared.
And he will play a key role in the reorganisation of the centre of Government. Mr Cummings has ordered the establishment of a new ‘collaboration hub’ in the Cabinet Office where he and other senior officials will try to fuse policy making with delivery.
One government source said: ‘With all the U-turns, things are clearly not working as well as we want them to be, but hopefully you will now see that start to change.’
Ministers will be formally told of Mr Case’s appointment at a meeting of the Cabinet this morning.
‘Problem-solver who gets things done’