Well, there’s the current incident, which seems a clear case of norms being strained or transgressed, opening up quite serious questions about the relationship between government and civil service that no one has any answers to.
There’s the Greenshill scandal, which seems to me like a good example of norms taking up the slack left by rules that aren’t fit for purpose, and not doing a good job of it.
During Covid it seems like a more formal delineation of role of the Chief Scientific Officer might have avoided scenes where the CSO went on TV declaring himself to be a scientist whose job was to speak scientific truth to power, while selling a government policy we later found it he had serious concerns about.
And then there’s Brexit, and while I wasn’t paying much attention I do remember friction between the civil service and government, with government figures making all sorts of accusations in a way that surely ran counter to the norms. More formal rules might have provided civil servants with more protection. I also remember reports of the dilemmas faced by civil servants when the government threatened to break the law over Brexit. That’s actually a really big example of norms and traditions simply not being up to the job of managing the relationship between government and civil service.
I'm not coming at any of this from an anti-civil service perspective. All I'm saying is that it does seem quite dependent on largely unwritten norms about The Way We Do Things that are coming under increasing strain because they weren't built for government by reckless spivs and morons. That stress-testing does also seem to be revealing some things about what we expect from the civil service, and how its relationship with government might be improved and made clearer.
