Latest editorial
PM fills top Civil Service jobs with stale male pale pals
DAVID CAMERON has created a Whitehall time warp where four in five senior civil servants are “pale, male and for sale,” Labour said yesterday.
Sir Humphrey Appleby, the oleaginous plum-voiced, Oxford-educated mandarin of Yes Minister, has become the caricature for civil servants.
That stereotype was broken after three terms of Labour government, with half of permanent secretaries at the top 16 government departments being women by 2011.
Similar stories
Meanwhile, incoming PM Andy Burnham dithers over who should be his Chancellor
In part II of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY explores how witch-hunting drives took hold in the Civil Service as the cold war emerged in the wake of WWII