Run Sir Humphrey, run.
I can hardly believe that I am writing this but of the three MPs who resigned over the Rwanda Bill, two voted for it and one abstained. Lee Anderson didn't vote Brendan Clarke-Smith, apparently voted yes and so did Jane Stevenson.
Only in the current Tory party could MPs resign from the government on principle and then support the law they resigned over. It is like throwing yourself on your sword and missing.
But far less amusing and far more worrying is the news that top Civil Servants are changing the rules and telling their staff they can ignore future injunctions from the ECHR.
Perhaps they should check the law on that? I hear one K. Starmer is a bit of an expert.
But telling people they can and should break the law is not acceptable ever and certainly not from the Civil Service and doesn’t need checking with anyone, it is that obvious.
How far our mandarins are willing to go to appease and pander to a bunch of incompetent, law breaking fanatics is truly scary. They are supposed to be better than this, in fact their exalted status is dependent on them being better than this and upholding the rule of law. They are servants of the crown not the current government.
If Labour do win the next election there will be a lot of Permanent Secretaries looking for work and the Civil Service code is going to have to be rewritten, strengthened and enforced properly. If I was Labour I would announce that advice to current ministers from the Civil Service will have to be made available to them if they win power.
Normally it is never released, but things have changed, the Tories have broken the conventions, the top of the Civil Service has shamed itself, it is going to have to be held to account.
The Civil Service’s bosses have failed the country, it is appallingly badly led, it is willing to order staff to act illegally, it is pandering to ministers desperate enough to break the law, all in support of an immoral and unworkable policy, throwing tax payers money away and destroying the country’s reputation.
If you want a well paid job after a long career as a mandarin, I would really leave now and not wait for the election. It is always more difficult to get a new job if you have been fired.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
In a presentation many years ago I heard the great Peter Hennessy (now a Cross bench peer), chronicler of Whitehall say that the problem with the Civil Service is that it is full of herbivores, occasional omnivores, with some exceptions who are carnivores. The point being the CS are not robust. They have been brow beaten by the Conservatives, special advisors and the press. It takes a certain kind of bully to kick someone you know can’t fight back. After 32 years I resigned, which is really the only recourse for civil servants who feel conflicted by their service. There are many really good decent honest CS but the working environment is horrendous. A fish rots from the head and the quality of Ministers, particularly junior Ministers is appalling bad at present (although no surprise that Liz Truss was the worst Secretary of State I endured in recent times). I left for a job that was not as well recompensed as my one in the CS (I was not in the Senior Covil Service). However I simply could not bring myself to shovel the Conservative shit any longer.
My recollection from the 50s and 60s was that politicians were older and entered politics after doing something else first, and that top civil servants were there for life. When did it get to be that both were just temporary activities to make a few contacts before jumping onto some other high-paying bandwagon?