It’s not unusual for governments to decide the solution to their frustrations is to tweak the machinery of government. Nor for senior public servants to channel those ambitions to safety.
But things look more serious in the UK. A sequence of reports from high-powered ‘independent’ commissions and well-connected think tanks are floating proposals which bear more than a resemblance to the state sector reforms implemented in New Zealand at the end of last century.
For one of the key players, the seeds of change were planted back in 2010. Back then, Michael Gove (now the Minister for the Cabinet Office) was put in charge of education. He coined the term ‘the Blob’ to describe the coalition of resistant civil servants and external ideologists who opposed his proposals to change the school system. And helping him on the Blob job was Dominic Cummings – PM Boris Johnson’s erstwhile chief strategist.