FROM THE EDITOR

The war might be over. If the hard rain promised by Dominic Cummings had been failing on Whitehall, it seems to have abated somewhat.

Since his former aide’s departure, Boris Johnson has made a number of appointments that seem to indicate he has decided to move government on from Cummings’s often deliberately provocative style. If bringing in Dan Rosenfield, a former Treasury civil servant, as the PM’s chief of staff indicated a move away from the previous regime’s siege mentality, then the revocation of Lord Frost’s appointment as national security adviser seemed to reassert the importance of civil service values – honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity – in government.

The move to name Ministry of Defence permanent secretary Sir Stephen Lovegrove to the post instead was a telling one. Frost’s appointment was, it seems, intended to shake up the advice given to Johnson, putting someone who had the PM’s trust in a key role. It was also initially announced in

June 2020 when Brexit negotiations, being led by Frost, were lolling somewhat. “Get a move on, our chap has a new job to get to in September,” seemed to be the message to Brussels.

Of course, this never came to pass. Frost stayed put as Brexit negotiator until the deal was reached on Christmas Eve, long after the previous national security adviser, Sir Mark Sedwill, had departed. Then, with only days left until he was set to start the post, it was announced that Lovegrove would take it on instead. Frost would not, in his new role as Johnson’s representative on Brexit and international policy, be leaving EU exit issues behind after all.

Quite how much all this had all been planned as a considered rejig of the civil service or a Brexit negotiating tactic is something that we might need to wait for memoirs to reveal. But Frost’s appointment was criticised by many, including Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May, for turning a civil service role into a political one.

Stopping that change is a good thing. Add in Tom Scholar’s reappointment as

Treasury perm sec despite his reported appearance on a No.10 hit list (with hit sometimes being spelled with an s), it looks like Cummings’s hard rain might be over.

I’m reminded of comments by Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, last month. “Now that the government’s “war on Whitehall” seems to be over... it’s worth asking: what has this latest attempt, accompanied as it has been by ferocious (if mostly anonymously briefed) rhetoric, actually involved?

The answer is, by historical standards, virtually nothing at all,” he wrote on Twitter.

“Absolutely nothing has changed in the civil service, apart from the identities of a few very senior office holders,” he added.

It might, though, be too early to conclude that nothing will change – but hopefully now civil service reforms will be done in partnership with those working in government, not in strident, grenade-throwing opposition to them. There is much in Michael Gove’s Ditchley lecture (the closest thing we have so far to a proper outline of what ministers want reforms to achieve) that civil servants agree with, and many examples of innovation in the civil service that a reform plan could highlight. In this issue, we go inside the Home Office’s Accelerated Capability Environment to take a look at one of them.

Now that the gloom of

Dom has been lifted from the government, ministers should work with officials to unlock the future.