Boris Johnson’s purge of the civil service will weaken him

The sacking of Jonathan Slater, the top official at the education department, is another constitutional provocation, says John Rentoul

What puzzles many observers, including Conservative MPs, is why the prime minister has taken such a confrontational approach (Getty)

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, refers to “Project Mao” – a plan to remove as many top officials as possible to create a “new sense of loyalty born of fear across Whitehall” – a senior civil servant recently told Andrew Adonis, the Labour peer.

So far, the purge has claimed the top civil servants at the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Office, as well as Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, who was also head of the home civil service. Sally Collier, a civil servant who was head of Ofqual, the exams regulator, quit on Tuesday, and yesterday it was confirmed that Jonathan Slater, permanent secretary at the Department for Education, will leave next week.

The two latest departures attracted attention mainly because Boris Johnson is accused of trying to shift the blame for the exam grades fiasco from elected politicians to officials, but at the same time seem to be part of Cummings’s drive to overhaul the civil service.