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When the democratic will of the people is applied - we voted for Brexit, how long did it take to make any progress and why? The civil service is supposed to support the government of the day not work against it. '"
The difference with the Boris government, and any other, including Theresa May's government, is that clashes are coming over the government's desire to do things that are outside the law.
The civil service is obliged to ensure that the government's actions are within the law - it is literally in the civil service code and the duty of senior civil servants to uphold. When I was in government I remember the amount of time I'd be in lengthy meetings with lawyers about whether we had the [ivires[/i to do the kind of legislation we were proposing. Often this would be in the context of primary and secondary legislation. The primary legislation - in a Bill the government had previously passed, would say something like the Government will solve X problem by introducing a legal body with enforcement powers. The secondary legislation that would come later would involve writing what that legal body could do and what were its enforcement powers. Now often - in all good faith and innocence - officials would sit down with a Minister who would be keen to sort out problem X, and would say lets really nail this now and send a strong message, so you'd make this legal body strong with strong enforcement powers. Then the lawyers would get involved and start pointing out that those enforcement powers you were introducing might be overreach on behalf of the government, in terms of the boundaries of what was supposed to be allowed by the primary legislation. If we pushed ahead anyway with something dicey, it would inevitably be in the House of Lords, where there are a lot of long standing experienced politicians with strong legal backgrounds, who would pick up the problems and on a subsequent reading we would have iterated the legislation to a point where it would be robust to any legal challenge (ie judicial review).
The reason you have this is to uphold a very strong principle in the British system of government. The law protects the citizens from the overreach of the powers of the state. For centuries it has been the Conservatives who were the strongest guardians of this, as they feared that it would be a left wing government who would be more likely to use the overreach of government power in to individuals' private lives.
The big difference with the Johnson/Cummings government, is that their approach is that the civil service and the courts are some kind of traitorous enemy trying to stand in the way of what they want to do (using government's powers) and so they want to cut out civil servants who are doing their jobs by telling them they need to act within the constraints of the law, and they want to attack the judiciary and limit the ability of citizens to use the law to constrain the government from overreaching their powers.
As well as the bullying issue with Priti Patel one of the charges against her coming from the civil service is that she has been angry because she's been trying to act outside the law. It is literally their duty to tell her she can't do that. She obviously has this wild west approach to government because that is what got her sacked by Theresa May in DfID when she went off meeting the Israelis to negotiate using aid money to fund the Israeli Defence Force for its 'humanitarian' (surely a euphemism) work in Gaza, which was not official government business but her own private sideline work.
Now at the moment, riding a wave of populism, this Tory government may get its way and start a new precedent in government where instead of having these long standing Oxford educated white male Sir Humphries, the government of the day gets to appoint whoever it wants in that role and gets to constrain the powers of the courts.
But they are also laying the ground for future Labour governments, because the political cycle always turns at some point. If the offspring of the Corbyn cult take power in a decade or so, a lot of conservatives would react with concern that the constraints of the Sir Humphries and the courts are no longer there. What if a Corbynista Labour PM imposes henchmen union thugs as Permanent Secretaries to ensure that the civil service is bullied in to carrying out their agenda whatever the law says (Labour bullying like Patel? surely not). Then they might want to overreach governments' powers in areas like compulsory purchase in order to nationalise things, and businesses/individuals would rightly want to exercise their right to use judicial review and the law to prevent government from overreaching in their lives. But what if those powers have been weakened by this Tory government, so Labour is able to force those things through.
That's when some people who are crowing in support of Boris and Cummings now will look back and say, you know what maybe unwinding centuries of tradition about the constraints of the power of government over the citizens wasn't such a smart move was it.
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