And rightly so. The government’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic has
demonstrated that the idea that Britain possesses a “Rolls-Royce civil service” is a myth.
The pandemic came hot on the heels of a four-year struggle over Brexit that showed
that, as well as being out of date, the governing class and its institutions are out of touch
with ordinary people.
The reforms will try to reconcile two aims: modernising government while reconnecting
it with the broader life of the nation. The civil service relies too much on the old model
of generalists: people who are recruited straight out of university and then moved from
one department to another. The government will try to recruit more specialists
(particularly people trained in maths and science) and encourage them to work in
“high-performance teams”. The civil service is still rooted, both institutionally and
culturally, in the prosperous south-east. The government will try to move departments
out of London.
It has two important things on its side: a widespread sense that the British state needs
fixing and a growing consensus on what needs to be done to fix it. But it will
nevertheless struggle with several problems of its own making. Mr Johnson is a big-
picture man who can succeed only if he’s surrounded by competent people who can
take care of detail and implementation. But (largely thanks to Brexit) he has stuffed his
cabinet with mediocrities who, rather than making up for their boss’s defects, simply
add defects of their own.
Mr Johnson’s chief lieutenants when it comes to government reform—Michael Gove,
chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the ubiquitous Mr Cummings—are certainly
not mediocrities. But they nevertheless thrive on conflict and chaos; Mr Cummings has
promised that a “hard rain” is going to fall on the civil service. They are also both natural
centralisers who talk about ceding power to the provinces while hoarding it themselves.
Government reform requires the “strong and slow boring of hard boards”, to borrow a
phrase from Max Weber. The government knows broadly what needs to be done to fix
the state. Whether its politicians are capable of carrying out this “slow boring” will be
one of the most interesting questions of 2021.
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