Rees Mogg's Midnight Mission to deliver Civil Service bad medicine

 


Mogg, following in the soggy footsteps of the shoe-chewing Francis Maude, wants to cut civil service jobs. Like most of his ilk, he doesn’t know what those civil servants do, or what the effect of cutting them would be. He just wants them gone.

Mogg also thinks everyone should be working in the office. Give him his due – it’s not just the oiks that he wants back in the office – as Father of the House, he ordered MP’s back to Parliament and vetoed online debates, in 2020 when the Pandemic was at its height. The reasons Mogg gave were to  “restore the cut and thrust of debate” and to “set an example to the rest of the country.” 

You might ask what kind of example the Commons sets for the country with their “cut and thrust” – or Bash Street Kids barracking – but you can at least see that Mogg is consistent. As a Conservative, he wants things to stay like they’ve always been.

So, no surprise that at the end of April, he crept round Civil Service offices leaving “Sorry I Missed You” notes on the empty desks of staff who were Working From Home. 

One question that was never answered was what Mogg said to those Civil Servants who were working in the office. I’m sure there must have been some. Even at the height of the Pandemic when I was WFH, I occasionally went back into the office and there were staff who (for personal reasons) had chosen to continue coming into the office. So what did Mogg say to them? Did he give them a gold star or an Easter Egg? I’m intrigued, because in all the years I worked for HMRC, I never saw a Minister. Not on a guided tour. Certainly not hopping around leaving notes on people’s desks.

Mogg’s notes remind me of the paper slips the rubber-heels mob used to leave when they did an after-hours security sweep of an office. The next morning, lucky winners would arrive to find “advisory notes” tucked into unlocked drawers or resting on top of a tray of paperwork that had been left on the desk. The notes had a clear purpose. An unambiguous and direct demonstration that you’d cocked up. But I’m not sure what purpose Mogg’s notes had. If the Civil Servants were Working From Home, they wouldn’t see Mogg’s Wish You Were Here note. It couldn’t all have been a publicity stunt could it?

Mogg’s note definitely pleased the Sunday Telegraph which attacked Working From Home in its 30th April edition. Gordon Rayner and Charles Hymas ran an article illustrated by plummeting graphs showing declining attendance at every ministry.  Camilla Tominey declared “Home-Working is a middle-class Remainer cult” serving a “comfortably off, entitled elite.” Full of bloke-in-the-pub reasoning which equated working from home with skiving off, she even managed to slip in the “gold-plated pensions”. “It’s as if (WFH) has now been priced in as a benefit for public sector workers, like a gold-plated pension.” That’s the biggest joke. Since pensions are based on pay, they’re only “gold-plated” for the highest grades. For most civil servants, especially those needing to claim in-work benefits to top up their pay, it’s more like a gold blend pension.

But of course, this is the sort of constituency Mogg is playing to. People who know what they know, even if it’s wrong. And Mogg himself is typical of a type of senior manager who doesn’t have a clue what his staff actually do. Details are for little people. As long as he can earn his money by taking care of the really top-level decisions like making sure there are plenty of heads bent over computers when he breezes into the office at 10:30 in the morning. And other top-level decisions like making sure the staff levels meet some mythical low-level figure (“like it used to be”) rather than the number of staff that are needed to deliver a service.


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