We have, of course, been laughing at this for decades. ‘Yes Minister’ is regarded as perhaps the finest British sitcom ever made precisely because it is devastatingly accurate. Sir Humphrey is not a caricature; he is a documentary subject lightly fictionalised. ‘The Thick of It’ is funnier and darker, but its portrait of an institution that treats elected politicians as an irritating management layer to be managed, delayed, and where possible redirected is not satire but observation. The reason these programmes land is that everyone who has encountered Whitehall at close quarters recognises the creature.
Kruger’s diagnosis of the structural problem is precise. The Cabinet Office, created in 1916 to manage Cabinet business, has since Tony Blair expanded nearly five fold to employ over 11,000 staff, becoming the principal source of authority across Whitehall, to the point that 10 Downing Street appears on the official organogram as a subsidiary unit of the Cabinet Office, listed alongside the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and the Public Inquiry Response Unit. The Prime Minister’s office, in other words, is officially a sub-department of the bureaucracy it nominally directs. If you wanted to design a system that maximised the power of unelected officials relative to elected ministers, you could scarcely do better.
The solution proposed is radical but coherent: abolish the Cabinet Office entirely, replace it with an Office of the Prime Minister led by a powerful Chief of Staff appointed directly by the PM, and a new Department of the Civil Service charged with headcount reduction, AI adoption, and transforming Whitehall’s culture and productivity. Ministers would gain real powers to hire and fire civil servants, including their Permanent Secretaries. Quangos would be brought back into departments or scrapped. The model draws on serious international precedents: Australia’s combined Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which coordinates the whole of government with only 1,000 officials, and Japan’s 2001 reforms, which reduced the number of departments from 22 to 12 after career civil servants had begun running their departments as independent operations, effectively ignoring the Prime Minister’s agenda.
There will be much pearl-clutching.
Here in the USA there is a lot of talk in the news about “threats to democracy.” There is no greater threat to democracy that a permanent civil service whose officers are, to all intents and purposes, impossible to fire, and without whom the government cannot do the people’s business.
I think the reform proposed here could be dramatically transformative for British government. However, one must recognize that the civil service is not a passive blob. They don’t care much about the country, they do care a LOT about their power and budgets. And so they will fight something like this with all their very considerable might. They have had 100 years to spread their tentacles into everything in the country, and will not give up without a fight. There will be no Geneva convention here. They will not hesitate to kill people, for example, and do not be at all surprised when Nigel’s laptop turns up with some horrible CSAM on it. These people are monsters, extremely powerful monsters, and will stop at nothing to maintain their power and budgets. DOGE tried here in the USA to get it under control, and even the might of Musk’s incredible engineering mind could not cut that Gordian knot.
Good luck to Nigel. He really is the last hope for the late great United Kingdom.