Whitehall – the nest of supercilious mandarins who don’t do their jobs properly!

 

There’s one main issue I’ll look at today – but it is one which ought to have repercussions beyond the current scandal. Thanks to a whistleblower who has firstly not remained anonymous and who has since quit his job, we’ve learned that during the evacuation of British people from Afghanistan there was nobody ‘at the helm’ in Whitehall. Nobody! 

I don’t mean Mr Raab who was dragged through the mud at the time because he was on holidays ‘in the Mediterranean’ – how dare he! – and worse, he and his family stayed in a ‘luxury hotel’ – what crime when most readers of the MSM are planning for holidays in the Bermudas or somewhere eco-friendly in Thailand.

It was worse than that. The top mandarins of the top Departments of State all were on holidays as well:

“Also off at the same time were the national security adviser Sir Stephen Lovegrove, plus David Williams and Matthew Rycroft, the heads of the Ministry of Defence and Home Office respectively.” (link)

Let that sink in: the mandarins whose departments were concerned with organising and administrating the evacuation of people from Afghanistan were on holidays, all at the same time, at the time when the Taliban was taking over and had already overrun most of the country. I’ll not look at the way this evacuation unfolded earlier this year, there are acres of reports and comments all over the interwebs. Just remember that the ‘official’ evacuation started on August 14th 2021 and that the Taliban had started to retake province after province from July 2021 onwards (link).

We wondered at the time if Biden had told Johnson and the other NATO Allies that this, and the abrupt withdrawal of all US troops and personnel was planned to start at the beginning of July 2021. Clearly, the MSM had inklings, so obviously I’d expect that the Whitehall mandarins knew and were hopefully better informed than the MSM to whom ‘sources’ doled out snippets. Do keep those dates in mind for the following paragraphs while I concentrate on the Whitehall ‘leaders’ involved because it shows the insouciance with which these ‘ennobled’ men are dealing with critical issues affecting our country. 

First, have a look at the CVs of those mandarins. They read like a merry-go-round between Whitehall Offices. Oh, they all acquired experiences in various areas – a bit like ‘on-the-job’ training, but the main point which left me dumbstruck was this: they all were in their particular job for less than a year when this crisis struck.

Here’s the Foreign Office Head Honcho, Sir Philip Barton KCMG OBE – tug your forelock or curtsey, you peasants! His official CV published on the government website is a bit obscure here, but he must have been promoted to his position sometime in August 2020. 

Then there’s Sir Stephen Lovegrove. He is ‘only’ the National Security Adviser’. He’s certainly been around the block, as permanent secretary in the MOD and the Department for Energy and Climate Change. He received his posting in March 2021.

Next, we have Matthew Rycroft CBE who became head mandarin at the Home Office in March 2020. As Permanent Secretary he’s the mandarin who is supposedly the hinge between the minister and the department. ‘His’ minister, as we all know, is Priti Patel – and hasn’t she and her department dealt brilliantly with the invasion of illegal migrant coming from France – not!

Finally there is David Williams at the MOD who received his appointment in April 2021. It stuck me forcefully how the 2021 appointees nevertheless went on holidays after only a scant few months in their new posting. Sir Philip Barton had only been in his posting for one year.

We might well ask: are the workings of the great offices of state so interchangeable that anyone can be posted anywhere, especially to top positions, keeping their holiday entitlements? Do they not have to inform themselves of possible threats to the Nation? Clearly, they seem to believe in their own superior knowledge of affairs permitting them to let their lives go on ‘as normal’ while events, always ‘unforeseeable’, overtake them. That can happen to the best of Sirs, can’t it!

That one of those mandarins whose departments were closely involved in the Afghan evacuation was on holidays – fine, that might be happenstance. That all four of them were away looks more like ‘enemy action’. I shudder to think what might happen if a spark were to ignite the dangerous posturing games played by Mr Biden both in regard to Russia and China – at one and the same time, no less. 

Clearly, neither Sir Philip B. nor Sir Stephen L. noticed any possible threat coming up over the horizon. Nor did they think they might conceivably have been needed to steer their particular department. After all, they have their minions, minions like that whistleblower Raphael Marshall. Here’s a good opinion piece written by Ross Clark to which I don’t need to add anything. 

The final cherry on the top of this unsavoury cake is that Sir Philp B. left for his holidays on the 9th of August (link) – a time where the poor sods in the army were already scrambling to get the evacuation running. Yes, let that sink in as well! His ‘excuse’? He had ‘put in place covers’ for his absence … and anyway, there’s always the Minister who will carry the can, not least because ‘sources’, anonymous of course, will judiciously feed little poisonous drops of spin to the MSM who can then bay for the head of that Minister.

This, dear friends, is how Whitehall works. We’ll find this attitude, this insouciance, this disregard for anything and anybody incommodating their cushy jobs in all those other Whitehall departments – or we would if our MSM would do their duty and do research rather than regurgitate mandarin spin.

They never do – for example they’ve been very careful not to look more deeply into that evacuation of the dog shelter, dogs, lock, stock and barrel which, we now learn, did take up space and time and resources which couldn’t be used to evacuate people. But when Princess Nut-Nuts drops ‘a word’, things will happen – see the juicy details here.

This is why we are in the ongoing covid mess, this is why we’re in the coming ‘net zero’ mess: the mandarins are making it so, their ministers are only puppets whose strings they pull. Those ministers might glory in their shiny titles, but their mandarins know full well who will get the chop when things go wrong – and it won’t be them.

It is they who sell constant spin to the MSM, it is they who knife their ministers in the back, it is they who govern this country with the help of the Westminster swamp critters populating the MSM. Here’s a final example of how they work: “Sources close to Liz Truss, Raab’s successor, said Barton retained her full support and that his job was not in danger.” (link, paywalled). Oh really? Are the chief editors in the MSM really just a bunch of gullible, credulous eejits believing every word they’re told by ‘sources’? Why should we believe the lot of them, forelocks dutifully tugged?

These Westminster critters, mandarins, MSM, politicians, dare to tell us how to live our lives, from mask mandates, lockdowns and enforced jab rules to heating, energy use and what we ought to eat! Ruining the wealth of the nation as the go along, ensconced in their £158,000 p.a. jobs and gold plated pensions? On our tax money!

When are our MPs going to do their jobs properly? Scrutinising government doesn’t mean only questioning the Ministers, it means taking a long, cold and hard look at the real string-pullers: the Mandarins of Whitehall. 

Off with their precious mandarin heads, I say – figuratively only, naturally!

 

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