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“Dominic Cummings was right”. No-one serious about their future in Labour Party politics would dare say that in public about the mercurial former chief adviser to Boris Johnson. But in private, again and again, that sentiment comes from the mouths of this new government’s most senior officials.
No, they are not talking about Cummings’s views on Brexit or Elon Musk. They are talking about ‘Whitehall’ – the shorthand by which the political class refers to the tangle of institutions and civil servants whose job it is to implement the government’s agenda.
In Whitehall, Cummings has long argued that “failure is normal” while “confident public school bluffers” – rather than people with real policy expertise – reign supreme.
Generations of politicians have made similar critiques but rarely with such freewheeling intensity.
Sir Keir Starmer’s speech on Thursday was primarily designed to offer more clarity for a sceptical public about the direction of his government, refining the five missions which he talked of in opposition.
But the speech had a secondary aim: galvanising Whitehall, after he accused too many civil servants of being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
When they were in opposition, many Labour figures took the view that the Conservatives had hobbled their own government through a needlessly antagonistic relationship with the civil service. Few talk that way now. “The biggest disappointment of going into government has been the quality of the civil service,” one leading government adviser said. Another added: “The Cummings analysis is where we are in lots of ways.”
One senior government source said: “Dominic Cummings was right about Whitehall. But I blame him and the Conservative Party for 14 years of low pay, bad leadership and demoralisation which means we don’t have the right people in the right places.”
Wherever the blame is ascribed for Whitehall’s deficiencies, the frustration is beginning to spill into public view.
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