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.