Here be warring mandarins …

 

It’s tragic that a sweet-looking woman, out walking her dog, vanished. It’s good that the search for her continues. It is not so good that this sad story has become the main news item for most of the national MSM. Here’s the collection of the print editions’ front pages. Me, being an inveterate sniffer-outer of squirrels and shiny round objects, asks ‘what are TPTB trying to hide?’

Well, there’s the ‘war of the mandarins’ in which The Times has taken a position by keeping their anti-Raab campaign going. At the same time they’re clutching their pearls because Sunak seems to be trying to do something about those illegal immigrants. It’s actually part and parcel of the same Whitehall warfare:

“Rishi Sunak is gearing up for a battle with the courts over plans to prevent migrants who have crossed the Channel in small boats from appealing against their deportation. The Home Office has drawn up two options to achieve the prime minister’s goal of automatically barring people who arrive in Britain illegally from claiming asylum, […] The more radical proposal would take the unprecedented step of withdrawing the right of illegal arrivals to appeal against their automatic exclusion from the asylum system. A second proposal under consideration would only allow them to lodge an appeal after they had been deported.” (link, paywalled)

Interesting, isn’t it, that this issue has become a ‘Sunak proposal,’ never mind that the HO, i.e. Ms Braverman, is working on this. Of course, one might have thought that the Raab Department would also be concerned, but since that lot is so fully occupied with wailing about Raab-the-bully, they clearly cannot possibly be expected to be involved. For the record, I’m quoting from one of the two articles in this morning’s Times (this and the following emphases are mine):

“When Dominic Raab was sacked by Liz Truss as justice secretary on September 6, the department was “breathing a collective sigh of relief”, as one senior official put it. “Champagne corks are metaphorically popping in the private office,” they said at the time, referring to the 90-strong team supporting the justice secretary. Seven weeks later Raab had returned. “Anxiety levels shot through the roof,” another civil servant in the department said.” (link, paywalled)

Leaving aside yon metaphorical champagne corks in a ’90-strong team’, I note that La Truss was the sacker-of-Raab. I’m of course not implying that she did so because of supporting female civil serpents, or because she herself didn’t want to have ‘a bully’ at her cabinet table! There’s more:

“Anonymous accounts given to The Times by senior and junior civil servants in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have explained why. One member of staff who has since left the department said they regularly witnessed staff in his private office “in floods of tears” and “physically shaken” after meetings and interactions with Raab. […] “He was known to be very, very abrasive and leaving people in tears,” the official said. “I saw him being very, very aggressive to senior officials on more than one occasion. He wasn’t as bad a bully as other bullies but this is more about his behaviour catching up with him. I’ve sat in rooms with secretaries of state being very demanding but in a more palatable way and you would see people physically shaken.” (link, paywalled)

So there are other ‘bad bullies’, presumably amongstTory ministers, are there? Interesting … We’re of course not wondering why people who seem to be mentally so very fragile haven’t been given jobs elsewhere. Isn’t that something the permanent secretaries, the mandarins, are supposed to do?

It’s also interesting that only The Times has allocated space and working hours to this anti-Raab campaign. There is however a rather interesting piece in the DT which shows me that this anti-Raab campaign is a pretext. In this very carefully-worded article we read:

“If certain voices in Westminster are to be believed, Rishi Sunak could sweep away all of his current difficulties with a single swing of the axe: by sacking Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary. In recent days various news outlets have suggested that the Prime Minister can reset his premiership by getting rid of his most senior adviser, as if Mr Case was to blame for everything from small boats to the cost of living crisis. Mr Case, 44, has found himself at the centre of an “orchestrated” campaign to oust him, and it tells us plenty about the current state of politics that so much heat is currently being directed towards an unelected official, rather than the ministers who are failing to inspire the electorate.” (paywalled link)

If this is true then we might ask if mandarins are now the arbiters not just of government policies but of who is the PM. This underlines my constant arguments about us being governed by unelected mandarins, not by our elected representatives. It’ll be the same under Labour.

It also tells us much about the mess this country is in when mandarins and their subordinates are wasting time on their own jealousies rather than helping to run the country which they piously keep saying is all they do. There’s one name being named – note the weaselling-out:

“It will not have escaped Mr Case’s attention that the latest story about him claimed that he was told about Mr Raab’s behaviour by Antonia Romeo, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice. Ms Romeo, 48, is one of those whose names has in the past been linked to the most senior civil service roles in Downing Street and the Treasury, though there is no suggestion she is behind any of the briefings. Others blame a separate faction for Mr Case’s current plight. One former minister in the Johnson government, who worked closely with Mr Case, said: “Simon is one of the few people remaining in No 10 from the Boris days and there are people who just want to clear out the Boris world from No 10.”  (paywalled link)

Is this whole murky mess, involving mandarins rather than ministers, the reason why only The Times is so feverishly involved in this anti-Case campaign,  without mentioning any Whitehall mandarin factions? Or is The Times doing so because their ‘black beast Cummings’, not just BJ, was involved in giving Mr Case the top mandarin job? 

Is this why Labour is so painfully silent both in regard to the anti-Raab campaign and the ‘case against Case’, i.e. because they do not want to take any sides in this mandarin battle before they get their feet under the cabinet table? Are the other Westminster papers keeping out of this because they fear losing their ‘sources’?

That’s all I have got for today. As for  yon much-vaunted ‘rolls-royce civil service’: don’t make me laugh! From Brexit to covid lockdowns to the current economic situation: mandarins have done more damage to this country than politicians. It won’t change under Labour. Have a good Six-Nations weekend.



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