Skipper

Students of British government have had a perrennial obsession with whether our permanent super-clever Oxbridge educated civil servants(like Lord Robin Butler pictured) regularly outflank their temporary ministers often of limited or inferior ability. The fact that 'Yes Minister'-a sit-com predicated precisely on this fraught relationship- had sold to so many countries worldwide suggests this is not merely a parochial national concern.

David Blunkett's diaries today suggest that the very similar sounding complaints made by Crossman, Benn and Castle in their diaries have not gone away. At a Cabinet meeting in February 2002, Blunkett laid into the mandarins:

'We have a situation in my department where virtually anything of any importance is leaked. The Immigration and Nationality Directorate is a complete shambles. The only reason we got a police reform white paper and the reform of immigration, nationality and asylum was because the two respective advisers worked extremely closely with me on them ... The civil service are very lucky that we can't sack them, that no one can sack them" - with the implication that they damn well would be sacked if I had my way, and they would be. At the end of all this diatribe Tony said: "Well, I think Richard Wilson's got the message. You really love the civil service, David. You've got a lot of time for them and you believe they're doing a first-class job" - and everybody just doubled up.'

Yesterday Blunkett's diaries claimed civil servants often foiled intended action by submitting excessively long and 'obscurantist' briefing documents on such topics along with inflated costs they claimed the Treasury would never accept. It all sounds a bit- no, a lot- Sir Humnphreyish and one wonders if:

a) such complaints have a genuine basis in fact? Civil Servants, from my brief sojourn in it, only do such things when they feel their departmental interests are threatened.

b) Blunkett was a headstrong minister who they felt needed restraining on some issues? Not impossible I'd say.

c) Blunkett was indecisive and civil servants merely filled the vacuum- the usual situation when civil servants 'manage' their minister but this seems highly unlikely as well.

d) his blindness made it easier to pull the wool over his unseeing eyes. You decide, but he must have become used to countering this sort of thing.

Or maybe we do really have a civil service which feels so threatened by a Labour government- which side-steps established procedures and listens more to special political advisers than the established servants of the crown- that it wilfully imposes its own agenda where it thinks it can get away with it? Or is this just the standard whinging of politicians who fail to achieve their objectives and cast around for scapegoats?