Civil Service

I tried to put the matter as fairly as I could, rather than in a partisan way. I was trying to explain that there has been a standing temptation on the part of Governments who feel a desire to shake up the system to get people in place who will enable them to do so. That was true of the Thatcher period and it was true of the Blair period, too. It is interesting that similar charges were levied in each period about the consequences of that. If we scrape away those charges and go beyond the political exchanges in those periods, the question is: was something happening to make the civil service politicised? Are politicians behaving in relation to the civil service in ways that are improper and disturbing its tradition of neutrality, independence and impartiality?