Dominic Cummings is right – it’s time for the civil service to modernise

Boris Johnson needs to lead from the front if meaningful change in Whitehall is going to happen, writes Andrew Grice

The PM’s former aide criticised government’s inner workings at the select committee hearing on Wednesday (EPA)

In a crisis, there is nothing better than the British civil service, Tony Blair argued in 2018. “I thought it had enormous strengths, when it came to managing the system and bringing the system powerfully together at points of crisis,” he said, while adding it was “really poor” at change.

A reputation enhanced by its handling of the 2008 financial crisis is now in tatters after the system failure on coronavirus. The planning for – and management of – the crisis has been woeful. The system prepared for a flu pandemic, rather than a novel virus. The 2016 dry run Operation Cygnus was, one of those involved told me, “a box-ticking exercise after which nothing changed”.

There were so many “Dom bombs” in Dominic Cummings’s remarkable select committee appearance that the ones he lobbed at the government machine were largely overlooked.