UK civil service tweet - done on purpose?

[CoRhona]

The official account of the civil service tweeted this earlier, widely thought to be about Boris' defence of Dominic Cimmings:

"Arrogant and offensive
Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?"

I think some poor sod has tweeted from the 'work' account instead of their own.

DH thinks it was done on purpose.

YABU - it most definitely was done on purpose

YANBU - Ooops...

I think they probably just followed their instincts, which we now know excuses everything.

Screenshot

The twitter poster rocks!

I so hope the account wasn’t hacked

That tweet from a personal account would still be gross misconduct for most companies on the basis that you should never share anything negative about your employer

Totally true. So you should always ensure that it can't be traced back to you.

My firm rule is always ‘if it’s between cock up and conspiracy, it’s always cock up’

Because people just aren’t that good at running conspiracies

How the tweet emerged is beyond me. I’d guess it was an accident. Someone joking around too near the final ‘send’ process.

Question to me is how widespread that sentiment is, and within which departments.

(And possibly a total spoof from a lookalike account? Or has that been ruled out?)

The real tragedy is that their actions will have more consequences than cummings did

This. There was an investigation announced within 30 minutes but Cummings (also a civil servant) potentially criminal act won't be investigated.

Brilliant and brave of the person who did it. Between JKR’s offer, the small fortune a crowd funding page would raise and a guaranteed job offer from someone who detests the government, whoever did it needn’t be afraid of the sack.

I wonder if it was meant to be a private message sent to a friend. I don’t use twitter so not sure how easy it would be to do it as a message by accident. Or maybe the person is wfh and left their laptop logged in to the twitter account and their partner/house mate did it. That would be my excuse if it was me and I was trying to wriggle out of trouble.

‘if it’s between cock up and conspiracy, it’s always cock up’

One person tweeting isn't a conspiracy though. It is one person tweeting.

More likely to be deliberate than an accident. You don't tweet stuff like that by mistake. And if it was really a matter of pressing "send" by mistake then you would delete it immediately, not leave it there for several hours of however long it was...

I reckon it was someone thinking of resigning anyway and this was the last straw. Maybe they had already resigned and were working notice, or on a short term contract?

I work in HR and have seen a few kamikaze emails sent to the whole company on someone's last day (before they shit diwn) before. This is similar but on a national scale.

I'd like to shake that person by the hand whoever they are.

@iVampire there's no way that was sent by accident!

I think it was very wrong and a very harmful thing to do - it undermines the civil service and government (andI don’t mean just this one). The civil service must be impartial and be about implementing government policy to their best regardless of how they feel about the party in power at the time. Of course there will be governments and individuals Politicians that civil servant think are awful and policies they totally disagree with but at the end of the day we elect the government not civil servant and civil servants are not accountable to the public. For the civil service to under,one the government is profoundly undemocratic.

I'd say the cock-up element is that a couple of dozen people know the login details for that account, and it's probably on a post-it on someone's screen too.

Deliberate tweet by someone who figures the odds of it being traced back to them are low, I reckon.

Civil servants have to abide by codes of conduct and whoever tweeted it would have been aware. This includes being very careful abput being political, it being unwise to attend demonstrations etc- especially once you've reached certain salary bands.

Even posting a tweet like that from their personal account could get them into deep water if it was picked up and linked to a civil servant.

I think it's highly unlikely to have been an accident.

Is JKR really wanting to encourage an unelected undemocratic governing elite? What happens when she agrees with the party she has elected? Will she be happy to have them undermine by their civil servants too because it doesn’t fit with the civil servants’ ideas?

Deliberate tweet by someone who figures the odds of it being traced back to them are low, I reckon.

Nah, it's easy to trace back what device a status was posted from, and which devices were logged in at the time. Whoever posted it knew what they were doing and the implications, but felt strongly enough that they didn't care about the consequences in terms of their job.

Haha brilliant! If this was happening every day then it wouldn’t be funny but the image of the U.K. CS is very staid.

@Pacmanitee Depends it they use a system account which several people use the password to. Then if you hidbehind a Vpn which obscured your IP address....

Alternatively it could have also been hacked. Malware on a civil servants pc working from home.

Whoever tweeted this won’t keep their job because of the need to maintain impartiality though. So impartiality will be restored and enforced. Nobody’s saying that the civil service ethos works with civil servants tweeting political views. What they are saying is that government measures based on trust and moral authority won’t work if senior people (Cummings) break with trust and destroy their government’s claims of moral authority by behaving like this.

It must be on the real CS account, not spoofed on a fake account because its being reported that an investigation is happening, quoting a government spokesperson. www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/24/can-you-imagine-having-to-work-with-these-truth-twisters

I don't think it undermines the civil service at all. Quite the opposite. I think the public perception will be more positive, other than with the minority that agree with Boris on the whole DC affair.

Not many people will have access to that account so should be easy to work out who did it. I’m a civil servant and I’d be expecting my P45 for that

I think it was an accident (didn’t switch accounts). I have almost done that as I manage a few accounts for work.

I think they’d have someone monitoring the work account in a Sunday afternoon, not actively engaging.

@lordfrontpaw I do too and I am so, so, SO careful when I post anything on social media.

That's why I thought it could have been someone who just pressed the wrong account button.

I would have thought if this was someone's "fuck you" they could have said much worse! although this has made international news so maybe this was enough

I never go on twitter when drunk or very tired for exactly that reason!