Sir Philip Rutnam's resignation

There are over 400,000 civil servants in the UK , Opal. Are you suggesting that we elect every single one of them?

Yet you and your cronies have constantly complained on GN that a certain "special advisor" is unelected. Are you suggesting that we elect all special advisors?

Same difference, and you know it.

Quite a few people aren't capable of seeing another point of view. I'm still waiting to hear who quizqueen has on mind to be drained from the swamp.

Denigrating other GNers as ‘not having a clue’ is what you usually do growstuff because you aren’t capable of seeing another point of view.
Senior civil servants remit is to give impartial advice, true,
But hubris comes into it too when Ministers are determined to have their own ( the governments) way about things, and they ( top civil servants) don’t like it, or don’t like the way things are done.
Whether Rutnam really has a case will be determined in due course.

You really don't have a clue Urmstongran! I come from a family of senior civil servants. They're the most boring, loyal and patriotic bunch you could ever meet. They would consider voting anything than Conservative akin to treason .

They've worked under Labour governments, but they're professionals and just do their job, which is to give impartial advice.

More than ‘being pushed around’ lemon sometimes. I agree with Jane10 that some of these top civil servants may well have voted Remain and unlike working with Mrs. May and her Brexit-Lite policy (which they could stomach) they’ve now got Boris who has an eighty seat majority in the House and is determined to play hardball with the E.U.

Don't be silly lemongrove. Workplace bullying is very real.

Philip Snowdon, who writes for the Spectator and is by no means a left-wing snowflake, is claiming that the Windrush scandal wasn't a civil service cock-up, but a ministerial initiative backed by primary legislation.

I expect Rutnam has added today's Mail on Sunday (and the rest) to his evidence file that he's been smeared.

His deputy has stepped into the job as an ‘acting’ ....so she obviously doesn't feel bullied.I doubt Rutnam felt bullied either ( what is is he, five years old?) he is a senior and seasoned civil servant used to getting his own way.

Apparently he’d been dubbed ‘Sir Calamity’ by some lower grade civil servants.

Spot on LadyG
It’s a power struggle, simple as that.Not the first time that the Home Office has clashed badly with the Minister, the government wants to push on with policies and reforms, and a senior civil servant doesn’t enjoy being as he sees it, being pushed around.

And which papers would those be, LadyG? The Sunday Times, The Heil on Sunday, The Telegraph?

I think that the court case may well bring out the truth.

From what I’ve read in the papers today the gentlemen in question is incompetent and a complete waste of space.

How are we to know the true facts when so many different stories are being published?

It's so easy to blame people, when you haven't a clue what their role is.

Hopefully, somebody with genuine leadership qualities will cometh!

Urmstongran You haven't any idea whether he has a leg to stand on. You don't know what evidence he has. I don't know, and neither do you, what grounds he'll cite for constructive dismissal. It's actually very hard to prove. Rutnam isn't stupid, so he must have something serious.

All civil servants are bound by a code of practice, which includes confidentiality, so the public does not know the truth of what's been going on. Interestingly, Amelia Gentleman, Boris Johnson's sister-in-law and the journalist who broke the Windrush scandal, has asked via Twitter for Rutnam to contact her.

It's all a bit peculiar.

1) His employer is actually the Civil Service, not the government.

2) The maximum payout for unfair dismissal is around £85,000 and I would bet anything he was offered more than that to go quietly. Brodie Clark, the former head of UK Border Force, was paid over £200k by the Home Office to go.

An employment tribunal might not even accept the case, if he has already refused a payout higher than that which the tribunal could award.

I was only musing in my last post. Of course democracy matters but it seemed to have been overlooked in the past few years vis a vis the Brexit situation.
Nobody is suggesting getting rid of all civil servants. I'm sure there are keen and able ones waiting in the wings. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Boris came. Who else might?
What will happen next? God knows!

Doesn't have a leg to stand on at a tribunal, as his failings were his downfall and the constant adverse leaks. He tried his shinnanigans on the wrong person and went before he was pushed.

People say they don't vote because nothing changes regardless of whom they vote for.

The reason nothing changes is down to the civil service in my opinion. Times are changing.

Jane10 if top civil servants left en masse, who would replace them?

Either SPADS such as Cummings or someone extremely compliant from the ranks of the lower echelons of the Civil Service, too nervous to do anything but agree with bullying SPADS or Ministers who are wet behind the ears and know nothing of correct procedures?

Civil servants do not make the rules, they carry out the wishes of the Government of the day within the law and are there to advise green Ministers.

Boris should not be able to change that and he is going down a dangerous route by appointing advisers such as Cummings and Ministers who think they know better or who want to operate outside the rule of law.

There have always been rumours of bullying, Gordon Brown had a fearsome reputation when Chancellor.

It is very worrying when Ministers new to the job do not at least listen to the advice of top Civil Servants.

It's clear that Boris wants things to be different, very different,

I'm sure he (or rather, Cummings) does want things to be different but that is not how democracy works.

Unless he works within the confines of the constitution, which is meant to provide a check to unlimited executive power, what we will get is a dictatorship

I realise that the constitution is a complete mystery to a great many people but it is vital to preserving democratic rule in the UK.

Essential parts of our constitution are that:

1) The 'executive' (i.e government) does not have unlimited power to do exactly what it wants to do. We fought a bloody civil war and chopped a king's head off in the 17th C in order to establish this principle. It is vitally important. Johnson is not supposed to be able to do what he wants.

2) It is subject to the Rule of Law. Parliament makes the law, the independent judiciary ensures that the law is correctly applied. The current law of the land says that an ex employee can take their former employee to court to sue for constructive dismissal. This law applies to everyone and that includes ex civil servants.

one man complaining about a minister not being nice to him is really pretty trivial

It is actually quite untrivial. To use a very hackneyed old cliche, government is like a machine; failures in the machine, even if apparently trivial, can have catastrophic consequences. What caused the Challenger disaster in 1986? Defective O rings.

It is also absolutely unprecedented for a top civil servant to go live on national TV in the way that Rutman did. They usually take a big payoff and complain put their side of the story in less attention catching ways.

I hope I'm not too unpleasant, but looking in from outside it all, I wonder if this won't be the first of many if the Whitehall 'mandarins' to leave? It's clear that Boris wants things to be different, very different, maybe he'll write this off as a case of 'can't make an omelette without breaking eggs'?
It's clear that the country has to move on from the past few years stagnation. This is also complicated by corona virus which may or may not turn out to be a very serious situation with a knock on effect to the economy.
Just writing this makes me realise that one man complaining about a minister not being nice to him is really pretty trivial.

It is not what you do, it is the way that you do it, and Priti Patel has long had a reputation for being neither pleasant nor particularly able, but of having a skin like rhinoceros and relying on her unpleasantness to get her own way.

I have worked with people, male and female, like that. The only consolation is that sooner or later they make themselves so objectionable that in the end someone senior, does finally give them the push and having made no friends on the way up, there is no one to help when they fall.

So far we have heard nothing from her about the plight of Nazarin Zhagari Radcliffe. That unfortunate woman in prison in Iran, whose plight Boris made worse by inaccurate and unchecked statements when he was Foreign Minister under Mrs May's premiership.

Civil Servants usually work there way up from graduate recruitment and any senior civil servant will have worked his way up through both Labour and Conservative governements and will at times had to call time on politicians on both sides when they have wanted to do things not within their remit.

I doubt that Johnson finds the situation the slightest bit embarrassing. He has absolutely no moral compass whatsoever and has made it absolutely clear that the standards and principles which have 'regulated' government for the last 100 years or so do not apply to his government. Patel will keep her job, cheered on by the more unpleasant elements in the UK population.

I hope Sir Philip Rutman has enough money not to impoverish himself when he takes the Goverment to court.

I bet Priti Patel will resign , especially as she will now be an embarrassment to Boris Johnson.