Skipper

The book written by Robert Hazell and his colleagues on how the Coalition works in practice was based on interviews with participants during the first 18 months of the administration. It reported all was going rather swimmingly within departments. Civil servants were succeeding in working with ministers from two very different parties and all was harmony and agreement throughout the whole gamut of Coalition activity.

Must confess I was a bit suspicious. All those arguments on welfare, AV, the Lords and that tiny little smidgeon of a disagreement: the EU and no problems? All that change mooted to conservative mandarins? Well it was only the first 18 months and civil servants never tell the truth when interviewed but slavishly default to the COI version of our democracy: elected masters and appointed civil servants. But today's Times takes the lid off what has really been going on.
  
The Time’s two page spread collated views from a wide range of luminaries including Tony Blair (advises Asian heads of government not to follow the British model), Andrew Adonis (‘We have a non expert civil service, characterised by very poor training’); Margaret Hodge (‘there’s a pervading sense that it is not their money…they escape responsibility’); Steve Hilton (‘When you try and make change happen, that’s not easy’); Jonathan Powell (‘The Civil Service is much too closed’)  and Peter Hennessy ( ‘There’s too much management speak. If the Sermon on the mount had been written in Whitehall, none of us would be Christian’).