For those who watch these things, the departure of Sir Mark Sedwill as cabinet secretary and chief security adviser followed a now familiar and depressing pattern.
Weeks of anonymous hostile briefing to the newspapers, suggesting a rift between the country’s most senior civil servant and No 10 staff over the handling of coronavirus, had risen to a crescendo, ending with a hastily arranged statement …
In case it gets forgotten in the next news cycle it needs to be said loud and clear that this way of doing business, involving anonymous briefings to the media about individual civil servants, is cowardly, unfair and undermining. Civil servants themselves are simply not in a position to respond – such briefings damage not just the person affected, but also the relationship of trust generally between government ministers and civil servants. Ultimately everyone knows where such malicious briefings come from and it is within the prime minister’s powers to stop them.
