Impartial Civil Service under attack

Two reasons why we should worry about the latest reshuffles First,

As Frost and his team of a dozen-plus negotiators headed to Brussels by train on Sunday, it was being revealed that Boris Johnson had given him a new role (and a peerage) as his national security adviser....The timing of Frost’s appointment could not have been more pointed. Although the vacancy has arisen because of the resignation of the cabinet secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, on Sunday night, giving the post to someone who is leading arguably the most important international talks since the Iraq war in 2003 sends a strong message to Brussels that the UK is prepared to walk away if a deal cannot be struck in summer talks.

A plaintive note to end, possibly indicating the dismay felt by all nice people with Johnson's determination:

Is there any hope?
Yes. It is hoped that five weeks of face-to-face meetings might yield results as they allow more nuanced discussions in informal meeting in corridors and over dinners.

Chaps will have a chance to just get along with other chaps and leave out all the nasty divisive stuff. KitKat anyone?

Vote Leave is now in Downing Street, [how did that happen I wonder] and Brexit is being repurposed to destabilise officials’ authority by casting their reasonable objections as signs of how out of step they are with voters’ mood

Pretty well unarguably out of step I would have thought -- but only with that misguided and racist majority who voted Brexit and then Tory.

If this ideological cleansing via hostile anonymised briefing is allowed to continue unchecked, it will blow away the defining qualities of the British civil service: political neutrality and recruitment on the basis of merit...

Who could disgaree with that assessment of the defining qualities? Poor old civil servants might even have to abandon their heroic and priestly mission

The departures at the top of the civil service in recent weeks will have a chilling effect on officials lower down the food chain, who may think again about speaking truth to power.

Pretty shamefacedly apologetic and uncritical all round, far from 'an analysis that has authority and integrity', although there is one sentence:

 It is true that these ideals have been chipped away for decades

I'll say. We can all see that now, of course, after such partisanship during Brexit.

The link alleging 'ideological cleansing' is to a piece by B Kerslake (president of the Local Government Association and former head of the civil service and permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government)

After decryig the cowardly business of briefing  against harmless civil servants who cannot answer back, and who never leak or brief themselves,  he says:

As well as specific briefing against Sedwill though, there has been another even more unpleasant line of attack: the performance of the whole civil service during the pandemic has apparently been judged and found wanting. 

I think the GUardian, Newsnight and C4 News might all be implicated in that, athough they have done their best to personalise it, of course.

The real problem, though is this:

Worse still, this government seems to be preparing to use the difficulties of delivering Brexit and the shortcomings in handling the pandemic as reasons for undermining civil servants’ impartiality [!]

 A pretty popular campaign if they do take them on, I would have thought