Boris’s ill-timed war Tory assault on civil service hit by emergencies

THE VIRUS DEAR BOY THE VIRUS

SOMETHING is rotten in the state of Boris. Not just the man himself but in the heart of the Government he rules.

Ministers and civil servants are locked in a civil war over who actually runs the show. It’s an age-old battle not too far removed from the vintage TV show Yes Minister.

This time it’s real and bigger, with deep consequences for the country’s democracy. Boris Johnson and his puppet master Dominic Cummings have decided to go nuclear against the traditional “permanent government” that is Whitehall.

Holed

Every Prime Minister gets a bit fed up with their civil servants and their apparent failure to deliver policies that they say the country voted for, even though very few voters actually read the manifesto.

At their most frustrated – some would say paranoid – moments, Prime Ministers and their Cabinet colleagues start muttering charges of sabotage.

For this one, goaded by Dom, the civil service is the enemy within.

Pity that Priti Patel was one of the frontline shock troops in the war. More so because the Home Office is one Whitehall bastion that is most overdue for reform. If ever there were a jagged peg in a ragged hole…

Others are equally unsuited to the task, though are likely to fail less dramatically.

Take Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, who survived in Cabinet despite having to bail out at Defence for being a security risk. Or Dominic

BEWARE a new Chancellor bearing gifts.

Especially one preening himself to deliver the first Budget of a Prime Minister promising to “level up” the economy to reward his newfound voters in the Midlands and the North. That’s Rishi

Raab, the Foreign Secretary who was surprised to find out how reliant Britain is on Calais. Or Attorney General Suella Braverman, whose mission is to politicise the court system.

Zealous Brexiteers all, and ready for a fight against a Whitehall bureaucracy they believe is made up of staunch Remainers who did, and will, get in the way.

Ministers may come and go but Sir Humphrey and his mandarin class have always been there to guide any radical minister away from anything too

Sunak’s mission later this week. But he faces two big problems in fulfilling Boris’s boast.

One is Tory MPS, who don’t much like the idea that unfair tax breaks for themselves and their wealthy voters in the South might be threatened.

“brave”. Keep calm and carry on regardless – less of a rallying call, more of a nod over a port in a gentleman’s club.

At least that’s the view of Cummings, whose criticism of the old-fashioned, incompetent and obstructive nature of the permanent civil service is well documented.

Now, just as the war is getting under way, events intervene.

The arrival of coronavirus has produced a national crisis and the timing of it could not have been worse

The second is, in the words credited to Tory toff PM Harold Macmillan, “events, dear boy, events”.

Coronavirus wasn’t part of the Budget script.

Now it will be used as an excuse for why Boris can’t deliver. for Boris’s war on the civil service. If there’s one thing the permanent government is good at it’s managing a good old national emergency calmly.

It pulls together in one collective effort – all the qualities that Boris and Dom denigrate.

Holed up in his grace and favour country mansion to avoid the flood victims, Boris at first tried to turn an uninterested face to the march of the advancing virus.

He is now losing battles on all fronts. Alas, poor Boris.