He came to office planning to blow a whirlwind of change through the musty corridors of power. Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, warned the civil service that his master intended to bend the 'feudal barons' to the will of a 'Napoleonic system' run from Number 10. Then, it alarmed the panjandrums of Whitehall now, it amuses them. Four years on, they quietly chuckle over dinner in St James's at the naivety of the Blairites who thought they were a match for the guile of the British civil service . It is time he got interested.
Obstruction is never so much ideological as inertial.
Whitehall is not riddled with Tory fifth columnists sabotaging a progressive government. Resistance to change is more sinuous and subtle. Like any institution of its venerable age and conservative character, the civil service is a vested interest naturally disposed to the maintenance of the status quo. The higher echelons believe themselves to be a 'Rolls-Royce' service, and the public will tend to esteem an 'independent' civil service higher than partisan politicians. Fearing to be accused of being bent on the politicisation of Whitehall, Ministers dare not voice aloud their discontent about the inadequacies of the bureaucracy.