The hullabaloo over mark sedwill's departure is overdone | thearticle

The hullabaloo over Sir Mark Sedwill’s departure as Cabinet Secretary and David Frost’s appointment as National Security Advisor is much overdone. The search for a different civil service is

as old as the civil service itself. Tony Blair described scars on his back from trying to get Britain’s state administration to work better, swifter. Every incoming prime minister thinks

that, if only he had the civil service of his or her dreams, then government would be so much better, liked and admired by voters who would duly reward the politicians who reformed

Whitehall. Sir Mark Sedwill was always an odd choice to be the _capo di tutti capi_ of the civil service. He was a first-rate professional diplomat who worked in Robin Cook’s private office

at the time of some innovative foreign policy decisions. He was there when Britain took a lead in forging coalitions to bring to an end the Milosevic wars in the West Balkans and in

stabilising Indonesia after the fall of Suharto. His tenure also coincided with the final end of Sovietism in East Europe, when Poland and other countries turned west and entered the EU.

Sedwill was sent to the toughest posts as Ambassador — Afghanistan and then Pakistan — and was the FCO’s political director. His switch to the home civil service came when Theresa May

appointed him Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Mrs May like Boris Johnson believed that if only she had an outsider running her department it would all go so much better. She took him

with her to Downing Street so in the space of a less than a half decade, a seasoned diplomat and securocrat suddenly became Britain’s top domestic policy state servant. Boris Johnson has

done the same as his predecessors. He wants his own man, someone with whom he feels comfortable, running the process of delivering his declared policies. It is easy to point fingers at

Dominic Cummings and his blogs about re-inventing government, so rambling and boring they could have been written by Steve Hilton. (David Cameron brought Hilton into No.10 to do pretty much

what Cummings is doing now). Sir Mark’s replacement will have to be a believer in Britain’s post-European future. One person who was always privately critical of Britain’s lack of

manoeuvrability because of the UK’s EU membership is David Frost. He has been named National Security Advisor. The title is grand. The job is empty. When he was Leader of the Opposition,

David Cameron invented the idea of a National Security Advisor as a gimmick There was no need for someone in addition to the very effective defence, security and international policy team of

the highest of high-flyers who work in the prime minister’s office and cabinet office. The disasters of Cameron’s intervention in Libya and Syria which gave rise to Islamic State terrorism

and gave Russia an opening into the Mediterranean as well as Russia’s attempted murder in Salisbury of Sergei Skripal, a man they saw as their Kim Philby, happened under the new national

security apparatus. The Foreign Office of course completely agreed with David Cameron that a National Security Advisor was just what the nation needed and made sure one of their inside top

management team was always named to the post. David Frost is above all a professional diplomat, a very hard worker, and a rare FCO insider who was ready to embrace Brexit at an early stage.

Johnson took him into his private office when he was named Foreign Secretary by Theresa May and trusts him to deliver some kind of Brexit. In the end, the Frost Brexit will fall far short of

the promises made since 2016 of a shining new future for Britain. Whatever Frost brings back will be hailed as a great victory. Tory MPs will be instructed to praise it as mission

accomplished. Johnson’s supreme task is to avoid a sense of crisis on 1st January 2021 to add to the herculean task of reconstructing Britain after Covid. But after all the excitements over

the Cummings and goings of the last 48 hours, the civil service will still be the same. It will outlast Boris Johnon, as it has all of his predecessors.