No 10’s obsession with ideological purity is forcing the best civil servants to resign
Alex Thomas would never dream of playing the victim or boasting that he’s a heroic “dissident” or “whistleblower”. As befits a British civil servant, understatement is his preferred style. The only public record of his decision to walk out of a government career that had seen him work for a cabinet secretary and help co-ordinate Britain’s response to Brexit is a piece called “Crossing the line” he published in the autumn.
Once, civil servants would ask each other occasionally “whether they know their line”; whether they had thought about what unethical action ministers might order them to take that would force them to resign. Now they are “asking in earnest”.
