Find me an example of any head of the HO who has been able to make the changes required by playing nicely, it can’t be done because the HO has been entrenched for many years.
David Blunkett on the HO
“It was a very difficult line to tread. These people can do you in. David [Blunketf] was mindful of that. He felt, ‘If I try and have too much of a clear-out of people who aren’t doing enough, then they can bring me tumbling down quite easily.’
“The people inside the Home Office didn’t believe that we would do what we said. And they had a policy of their own. I’ve never experienced anything quite like the first few months here. We were running parallel policies. There were my policies and there was what officials called ‘Home Office policy’, and that was what they worked to. I had to say to them over and over again, ‘There is only one policy and it’s what we say it is.'”
That was 20 years ago
Amber Rudd on Rutnam
“I find his absence inappropriate. He was absent through my final few weeks and days. I think a good permanent secretary would lean in to a real difficulty like this rather than sit back from it.” Asked if he was supportive, she said: “No, not really.”
That was just two years ago.
From my article posted earlier:
“The Home Office has always played dirty when a minister attempts to overturn its shibboleths. The moment its mandarins sniff trouble, stories start appearing in the press about how the new minister is out of his or her depth, unthinking, posturing and — always the same — a variation on stupid”
And to highlight that particular point I refer you back to what an earlier poster said of ‘someone’ she knew who worked in the HO:
Busybusybust
I know someone who recent retired from the Home Office. He say she truly is a nasty piece of work, and it’s well known that she is incredibly thick Civil servant’ measure of how understandable a document was: ‘will Priti Patel understand it’