Scarred, stunned and with serious casualties in its higher ranks, the civil service has survived the Cummings blitz. The sudden departure of the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, in the wake of the forced resignation of his protégé Lee Cain, No 10’s director of communications, seems to mark the end of a painful year-long political war against what Cummings and his allies refer to scathingly as “the Blob”.
But any celebrations among the senior mandarins of Whitehall might be premature. This was a palace coup, not a counter-revolution. Cummings’s erstwhile patron Michael Gove remains in a key position at the Cabinet Office: unencumbered by heavy departmental responsibilities and able to engage in “blue sky” speculation, Gove is the government’s playmaker. The removal of Cummings and Cain will not end arguments over advice in Boris Johnson’s government. As the pandemic has demonstrated, advice-giving in politics is never without friction – even when it concerns seemingly objective scientific questions.
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