By now, I would be prepared to guess that every member of the UK Senior Civil Service (SCS) will have had their attention drawn to Dominic Cummings’ blog https://dominiccummings.com – the recent headlines have been made by the most recent blog entry at the time of writing (07-Jan-2020), namely Dom’s attempts to do direct personal recruitment into the Number 10 Policy Unit, (and a few ambitious policy wonks may have been initially excited at the thought of going to work for him), but it’s all the preceding articles on Dom’s website that the SCS should be reading.

Dom pretty much lays it out there – he doesn’t like the way the Civil Service is run, he has a completely different set of values and a completely different expectation of what work should be.

He’s hardly the first person to express such frustrations – there’s a long history of people complaining about the Civil Service going back to C. Northcote Parkinson (of Parkinson’s Law fame) in the 1950s, but Dom may well be the first such person to find himself in a position of sufficient power to be able to actually do something about it.

The reaction of the mandarin classes has been predictable. Here’s one: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jan/03/dominic-cummings-call-for-no-10-staff-may-break-employment-law

Indeed employment law is one of the things standing in Dom’s way, whether he has realised it yet or not. But there is no sign that Dom is the sort of man to fall at the first hurdle.

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