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The official civil service code is intact, but a powerful whiff of hypocrisy lingers on the Whitehall air
When power was just a glimmer on the horizon, Conservative MPs used to delight in attacking Labour's recruitment of political sympathisers as government special advisers and spin doctors – in spite of the fact that many of the new Tory leadership, David Cameron and George Osborne among them, had themselves cut their teeth in such jobs. Soon after he came to power, Mr Cameron pointedly spoke of his profound respect for the civil service. Yet how quickly things change.
The prime minister's speech branding bureaucrats as the enemies of enterprise was only the most recent upset for the mandarinate, many of whom are willy-nilly veterans of 13 years of Labour's permanent revolution. It triggered a protest from the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, in the latest of a series of leaks which include a stern put-down of ministers whom Sir Gus suspected of briefing against the Electoral Commission boss Jenny Watson, and a paper from him urging the case for an economic Plan B.
Then there are the special advisers. It is typical of incoming governments to wonder why the levers of power seem not to be connected to the rest of the machine, and to look to bring in outside support. To some degree, they all do it. But there is now an unmistakable backtracking on the coalition commitment to limit their number. This suggests that ministers in this government too are increasingly frustrated by the Whitehall establishment.
The biggest transgressor seems to be the education secretary, Michael Gove, who has assembled a praetorian guard of sympathisers. Some of these involve the arms-length New Schools Network, set up and run by Mr Gove's former adviser Rachel Wolf and funded by the taxpayer. For some months the NSN was a base for another former Gove adviser, Dominic Cummings, blackballed last year by Andy Coulson for a role at Mr Gove's right hand on the grounds that he was "too leaky". Now Mr Coulson is out and Mr Cummings is back in. He replaces another special adviser, Elena Narozanski. Fortunately, Mr Gove needs some new speech writers, and Ms Narozanski is the insiders' top tip for one of the jobs. Meanwhile Mr Gove has appointed a new head of news, James Frayne, from the Westbourne lobbying firm, famously well-connected to the Tory party.
Radical ministers always need kindred spirits, but few have recruited them as comprehensively as Mr Gove appears to have done. He has done nothing wrong – though the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude might look at the breach of his jobs freeze. The official civil service code is intact. But a powerful whiff of hypocrisy lingers on the Whitehall air.
