Mandarins vs. weirdos and wild cards

To The Guardian

I can see why Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings may want to radically change the civil service. Clearly the traditional civil service attributes of honesty, integrity and impartiality do not fit well with their way of doing business.

Cummings’s reported concern about the Kafkaesque influence of senior mandarins perhaps reflects the apparent refusal of the Johnson Government to acknowledge that there may be some barriers to achieving their objectives.

Civil servants have the job of turning ideological aspirations into real-world deliverables. This often involves dealing with politically inconvenient practicalities – for example, HMRC advising that it may take up to five years, rather than one year, to develop the complex IT needed to support new Brexit customs arrangements.

Advice to ministers highlighting such problems may influence them to amend policy, but it is most likely based on impartial analysis and usually supported by detailed briefing papers and even more detailed reports, so nothing Kafkaesque about it. It only becomes Kafkaesque when the Government and its advisers suppress, redact and dress up the information in political spin.

Gerald Leach (retired civil servant), Pocklington, East Yorkshire

To The Daily Telegraph

As a former civil servant with an advanced Stem degree, I broadly agree with Rachel Wolf’s observations about humanities “generalists” being promoted to positions for which they lack the competence. The absence of accountability is astounding, and the chances of being fired or demoted for incompetence are vanishingly small. Knighthoods outnumber cashierings.

One reason I left the civil service was the poor pay. Scientists and engineers can earn substantially more and be promoted faster in private industry. Unless the

Government is willing to improve the salary and career structure for Stem specialists, the civil service will struggle to attract and retain a skilled workforce. Instead, it will remain a comfortable haven for humanities graduates who know how to pass a psychometric test and spout fashionable jargon, but who cannot lead the hi-tech projects on which Britain’s future depends.

Neil J. Young, United States

To The Times

Dominic Cummings does not seem to realise that the weirdos and wild cards in government occur in the form of politicians and their special advisers. The job of the civil service is to help turn weirdness into workable policy. If you put wild cards everywhere, the ordinary stuff of organisation will not get done and the public will not get what they voted for.

Richard Adams, Beaumaris, Anglesey