Those of us wondering how our once Rolls-Royce government machine can have been allowed to descend into quite such a mire of institutional incompetence might do well to ponder Rachel Sylvester's interview in the Torygraph with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull. He is the very model of a Blairite mandarin -- a blairin, perhaps, might be a more appropriate term to describe the change that has come over our senior civil servants.

It goes without saying that Sir Andrew wishes to modernise the service; but it is the way he wishes to change its very ethos which merits attention. He is, we are told, 'trying to change the rest of Whitehall from a policy-advice service into a public-service delivery machine'. A revolutionary change indeed, and an approach which lies at the very heart of the disaster that is now government administration. For the one thing Whitehall cannot do is deliver public services. It is precisely such maniacal, control-freakish centralisation that is destroying our public services. The one thing Whitehall is needed to do is deliver high-quality policy advice to the government. Yet from Sir Andrew's remarks, it appears this terrain has been abandoned to the political 'advisers' whose crass, naive, jejeune, adolescent maunderings are now, heaven help us, official policy.

Yet in the very next breath, Air Andrew tells us that the man in Whitehall cannot run public services and that they must be decentralised! Key passage to puzzle over:

'"Decentralisation hasn't gone far enough," he says. "In the ultimate world, there's a view that this should go all the way down to the users of the services." He uses the Blairite buzzword "choice" frequently - although he admits that the Government's "deeds" have not quite caught up with its "thinking" about the importance of giving users of schools and hospitals more power over local institutions. "Choice is a very big and revolutionary concept for us. Everything else is a variant of instructing down and reporting up. When you get to choice, all of a sudden you're reporting to the people you're serving. Who do schools and hospitals see themselves working for? They should work for the man in Whitehall only in so far as they're fulfilling their duty to meet certain minimum standards - but, beyond that, they should work for the users of their services. That's a big step... Choice not only threatens the people working in the organisations, it threatens our power as well."'

Huh? How to explain such contradictory thinking? Simple. Just listen to the language of government ministers, all about decentralisation this and choice that and empowerment the other; then think of what they are actually doing, which is trying to control everything that moves, including the local communities they have 'empowered', and to destroy the independence of professionals. Their rhetoric is totally at odds with their actions. Sir Andrew is indeed the perfect Blairite mandarin.