According to The Crown at least, an awkward situation ensued in 1953 when Tommy Lascelles retired as principal private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II. The young monarch, just a year into her reign, had hoped to promote Martin Charteris, who had held the role when she was heir apparent. Lascelles intervened: this was not how things were done. Instead, Michael Adeane, Lascelles’ deputy, who had been promoted up through the ranks, would take the role. It didn’t matter whether the Queen thought Charteris was more suited to the role, or more aligned to her expectations of private secretary. Convention won out, and that was that.
And that’s in a stylised monarchy! For today’s civil service, criticism about the over-promotion of government officials in the name of protocol is all too real, and all too familiar. A growing body of thought – often centred around Boris Johnson’s renegade special advisor, Dominic Cummings, but increasingly popular with Labour MPs – holds this attachment with convention responsible for the so-called Blob’s inability to attract or retain talent.
Rather than hiring top performers from varied fields (such as the health service, local government, construction or business), the civil service is often seen as drawing too many of its employees from a pool of PPE or policy development graduates at top universities. Many arrive into the competitive Fast Stream and then never leave. Some have pointed out that this leaves government departments sluggish and exposed to groupthink: forever reselecting mandarins who have only ever seen their duties as an academic exercise.
In December 2024, despite pledging to “rewire government” with his plans for the civil service, Keir Starmer appointed the least radical candidate as his new cabinet secretary. Chris Wormald, the former permanent secretary of the Department of Health and Social Care, was a career civil servant whom Boris Johnson passed over for promotion in 2020. Criticism abounded. One cabinet minister reportedly said: “If you want to do drastic reform of the state, you don’t appoint someone whose grandfather and father were both civil servants.” But six months later, Wormald is reportedly butting heads with senior Starmerites.
There are members of the government who understand the desperation for civil service reform. Pat McFadden has recently unveiled a raft of initiatives for change. A call put out for last month for “innovators and disruptors” plainly echoed the Cummings-era advert for “weirdos and misfits” (which ended in the very public sacking of Andrew Sabisky).
And yesterday (1 August 2025), the government announced that places on the main civil service internship scheme will be restricted to applicants from “lower socio-economic backgrounds”.
You can see the government’s logic here. According to the Social Mobility Commission, civil servants are currently more likely to come from professional backgrounds. So, drawing in a wider range of young people to take on roles in the civil service will help to diversify the range of approaches within government. “We need to get more working-class young people into the civil service, so it harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country,” McFadden told BBC Breakfast on Friday.
But breaking old habits takes time – and will likely require more than an arguably performative change to the criteria for internships. It will need deeper fixes: to the way the civil service operates; to its hiring and firing decisions; and to the way internal promotions are justified. Some in Labour (particularly those MPs in the Labour Growth Group) have clearly grasped the enormity of the challenge. But all those in charge have done so far is tinker around the edges.
[Further reading: Are the Greens heading left?]
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