The fallout from Priti’s Rwanda policy continues in earnest over in Woke Whitehall. After Guido revealed Home Office civil servants had slammed the immigration plan as “racist” on a private forum with Permanent Secretary Matthew Rycroft – with some mandarins even threatening to “organise and resist” – this morning both the Times and the Guardian follow up with claims that Rycroft erupted at staff for leaking the discussion to Guido and told them to get on with the job. Rycroft even had to remind them what that actually means: ministers decide, and officials implement. Unelected bureaucrats don’t have the authority to dictate policy based on what their liberal friends will think of them.

One of the four supposed ‘core values‘ of the civil service is impartiality. All staff are supposed to “serve equally well governments of different political persuasions.” Yet time and again, stories emerge of Whitehall mandarins hosting radical, anti-government activists, sending departments on pointless woke workshops, and insisting staff add pronouns to their emails. It’s not just that Whitehall is wasteful; there is a deep ideological rot within it that, for all the ministerial talk, still hasn’t been addressed.

A civil service source warns Guido of the extent of the problem, claiming there is a “complete institutional capture” throughout, and that while not every employee is a lentil-munching Guardianista, the “mouthy ones are“. Those who are sceptical of the woke orthodoxy, particularly at a more junior level, often stay quiet just to avoid landing on “the wrong side of peers and superiors“. The Home Office debacle is just the tip of the iceberg – this is a bigger problem that will only get worse unless ministers take it seriously, and quickly. Universities are pumping out woke-minded graduates who are taking the warped mores and norms of the student union into the civil service…