But Johnson’s battle with bureaucracy started long before then. When he entered Downing Street in 2019, he brought in maverick Vote Leave campaigner Dominic Cummings as chief adviser. Cummings, an ex-special adviser, spoke about slashing departments and hiring “weirdos” and “misfits” instead of Whitehall old hands to shake things up. Cummings was a former aide to Tory Michael Gove, who had coined the phrase “the blob” to describe the shortcomings of the government machine.
At the height of the Covid pandemic, Johnson berated parts of a government machine that he said had “seemed to respond so sluggishly” to the crisis, likening it to a “recurring bad dream when you are telling your feet to run and your feet won’t move.” In the dying days of his administration he set out plans to cut 91,000 civil service jobs, although this never came to pass.
Liz Truss
No ex-prime minister has more beef with officialdom than Truss, who won over Tory members with regular attacks on a ballooning public sector — then accused it of plotting to bring her down.
The former Conservative leader has repeatedly blamed the abrupt halt to her 49-day premiership on the “deep state,” claiming that an establishment plot blocked her tax-slashing plans. Truss said the Bank of England, Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility spending watchdog had undermined her growth agenda and spooked the markets — a claim met with more than a few raised eyebrows from those who worked alongside her.
Truss has since gone stateside with her critique, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year that decisions “are not being made by politicians” and that “unelected bureaucrats” are really running the United Kingdom.