Whitehall’s digital tsar gives himself the reboot

THE prominent Whitehall departure of the summer is Mike Bracken, promoted to head of data service only a few months ago. I gather he clashed with ministerial departments who had a ‘very strong preference for controlling their own software’. The digital tsar wanted to run things firmly from the centre.

‘Mike thought Ministers were confused about what they wanted,’ says my Civil Service source. ‘He got quite bolshie about budgets. He thought the big commitments that he wanted to develop his project were being fudged.’

That hasn’t pleased Bracken’s senior colleagues in the Cabinet Office. They point out he was offered ‘pretty generous’ funding for his plans. ‘It makes him one of the few to leave a job after being offered more money to carry it out,’ snipes one.

Publishing a ‘farewell letter’ to colleagues did not help the Whitehall mood – and nor did addressing his work mates in it as ‘you lot’. ‘Some thought it a tad on the grand side,’ murmurs my mole.

The summer transfer season for senior officials is increasingly hectic. Last year, Stephen Kelly resigned at the same time as Chief Operating Officer in Whitehall, while in 2012, John Collington threw in the towel as the chap in charge of cutting the costs of government procurement.

Meanwhile, one of the brightest young Cameroons, Rohan Silva, who now runs a hip place for tech entrepreneurs in Hoxton, East London, is said to be about to embark on advising Labour’s main mayoral candidate, Tessa Jowell, on technology.

‘Tessa likes a cross-party romance,’ jokes one of her backers.

Modernising Tories once led the way on digital matters. At this rate, they’ll have to get the bloke in from TV’s The IT Crowd to switch the computers off and on again.