Boris Johnson’s purge of the civil service will weaken him

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, refers to “Project Mao” – a plan to remove as many top officials as possible to create a “new sense of loyalty born of fear across Whitehall” – a senior civil servant recently told Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer.

So far, the purge has claimed the top civil servants at the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Office, as well as Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, who was also head of the home civil service. Sally Collier, a civil servant who was head of Ofqual, the exams regulator, quit on Tuesday, and yesterday it was confirmed that Jonathan Slater, permanent secretary at the Department for Education, will leave next week.

The two latest departures attracted attention mainly because Boris Johnson is accused of trying to shift the blame for the exam grades fiasco from elected politicians to officials, but at the same time seem to be part of Cummings’s drive to overhaul the civil service.

Cummings is engaged in setting up a prime minister’s department in all but name in the Cabinet Office, which backs on to 10 Downing Street. He claims he wants to empower departments, presumably under new leadership more aligned with Johnson’s priorities, but to make central coordination better.

Some of this is to be expected under any new government. In the first two years of the coalition government, between 2010 and 2012, the permanent secretaries of 13 out of the 20 government departments changed jobs or left. The Labour government in 1997 found itself in a cold war with an older generation of civil servants, with Terry Burns, the top official at the Treasury, moving on, along with most heads of press offices, while an influx of political advisers heralded the change of direction.

This has always been one of those grey areas of the flexible British constitution. The simple version taught at A-level describes a system of temporary elected ministers who make decisions, and permanent civil servants who carry them out. But in practice, personalities and culture mean that elected politicians have to have some control over which civil servants work for them.

That is why, despite their title, permanent secretaries are now on five-year contracts, but even that has failed to protect Slater and several of his colleagues from the cultural revolution sweeping Whitehall.

What puzzles many observers, including Conservative MPs, is why the prime minister has taken such a confrontational approach. An official statement yesterday said that Johnson wanted “fresh official leadership” at the education department – in effect publicly sacking Slater. And the prime minister has allowed Cummings to wander about the Cabinet Office with a floor plan and to tell a Zoom meeting of political advisers “a hard rain is coming”.

Asked about Slater’s departure, one Tory MP asked: “Why sack him now?” He could have been allowed to leave quietly in a month or two, but it seems that Johnson wanted to make an example of him.

Maybe this is like those other constitutional provocations – proroguing parliament, reviewing the powers of judges, installing a political appointee as national security adviser – designed to outrage the liberal Remain “establishment” and thus to dramatise Johnson’s heroic struggle to deliver for “his people”.

But it strikes me as likely to be counterproductive. Any government needs civil servants to deliver its programme, and while new permanent secretaries may be more in tune with the Johnson-Cummings project, a climate of fear is not the way to get the best out of the civil service generally.