Helen MacNamara

And that tight team includes the very senior civil servants.

So, of course, not all permanent secretaries get on brilliantly together.

But you would more commonly have a sense of camaraderie and colleagues working together and trying to solve a problem together.

And there's quite a lot of civil service to civil service hostility in here as well, which isn't very nice to see.

So you don't even have to have a lovely dossier.

But my entire civil service life, like when something's gone wrong.

All I did was go around marking everyone's homework.

When something's gone wrong or you've got something wrong, the very first thing you do.

And actually, one of the lovely things about being a civil servant is you don't have to go and stand up in the House of Commons and say X or Y or Z. You can actually have a really honest conversation about who got something wrong.

And you're like, oh, we got that wrong and shouldn't have done that and thinking about it.

Is that what happened?

I know.

Oh, it is.

Well, it's what you used to have.

And you shouldn't either, right?

This is how the civil service gets really good at governing, is you have honest conversations about what you've just stuffed up, and then you say, let's not do that again, and then you move on.

And it's really, I think it's indicative.

Well, yes.

The deep state strikes again.

Or you could imagine that people go into the civil service because they're motivated by wanting to work for the public good or probably serve their government and they want to get better at it.