Of all the politicians to take up arms against Sir Humphrey, Keir Starmer is the most unlikely. After all, this dream-free embodiment of bland managerialism and stultifying bureaucracy is – as a former director of public prosecutions – the first prime minister to have served as a Whitehall permanent secretary. He is the mandarins’ mandarin.

Even giving the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt that this was an honest mistake, what it reveals about his judgment is utterly damning

Even giving the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt that this was an honest mistake, what it reveals about his judgment is utterly damning

Yet it is by rallying the country against the abominable blob that Starmer has spied a possible route out of the Mandelson scandal. Having fired the chief Foreign Office official Sir Olly Robbins at the end of last week, he complained in the Commons yesterday that ‘it is simply not good enough’ for senior civil servants to have failed to provide him with information relevant to national security. The Foreign Office’s wings had been clipped, he stressed, informing the House that FCDO officials would no longer be able to override UK security vetting decisions. The message was abundantly clear: the civil servants have let him and all of us down.

There is no doubt the civil service is utterly dysfunctional and........

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