Why does the civil service get targeted for reform?

Suddenly, radical reform of Whitehall is in fashion again. Sir Keir Starmer spoke last week of civil servants lingering in the "tepid bath of managed decline" and now his de facto deputy, cabinet office minister Pat McFadden, has urged departments to behave more like tech startups by adopting the "test and learn culture” of the best digital companies, bringing in outsiders, and abandoning “mind-bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting” application processes for civil service jobs.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Ministers have also picked up on Kemi Badenoch’s inchoate rhetoric about “rewiring” government, though not going so offensively far as her claim that 10 per cent of civil servants are so bad they should be in prison because they leak official secrets and “agitate” against ministers. Doubtless, the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency in the United States, led by Elon Musk, has prompted some reflection on this side of the Atlantic.

So the civil service is under scrutiny, if not attack. But not for the first time...

Is bringing in outsiders to Whitehall departments a new idea?

No, and the private sector has often been regarded as a sort of magic elixir for bureaucratic inertia, real or imagined. It has been done frequently, in fact, and with varying degrees of success. For example, more than half a century ago the Conservative government led by Ted Heath, a self-consciously technocratic and corporatist administration, recruited businessmen to try to improve efficiency, and this approach was placed on a more permanent and formal footing by Margaret Thatcher when she became prime minister of a great reforming government in 1979.