lex Thomas would never dream of playing the victim or boasting that he’s a heroic “dissident” or “whistleblower”. As befits a British civil servant, understatement is his preferred style. The only public record of his decision to walk out of a government career that had seen him work for a cabinet secretary and help co-ordinate Britain’s response to Brexit is a piece called “Crossing the line” he published in the autumn. Once, civil servants would ask each other occasionally “whether they know their line”; whether they had thought about what unethical action ministers might order them to take that would force them to resign. Now they are “asking in earnest”. For Sir Jonathan Jones, the then head of the government’s legal service, the line was Boris Johnson’s decision to authorise breaking international law and the willingness of the supposedly honourable justice secretary and attorney general to cover for him. For others, it is the bullying and the sneering. Sir Ivan Rogers, the former ambassador to the EU, was forced out when his private view that Brexit would drag on for years was leaked. Rogers told me that Johnson had made many of the brightest civil servants he knew leave or think about leaving, to employers who would be happy to have them. A totalitarian emphasis on ideological purity is pushing them over the line. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never wanted to know whether Rogers believed in their ideology. “They expected me to work as hard as I could to find ways to implement their policies. And I did.” Private belief and public duties were separate worlds. Now we have a government that wants to own civil servants’ souls. They must be true believers, or pretend to be, if they hope to get on. A civil servant labelled a “Remainer” by the Brexiters is as suspect as a Russian labelled a “class enemy” by the communists. They are on what our government, drawing on all the benefits of an Oxbridge education, calls its “shit list” of enemies who must be purged. Most public sector workers have no difficulty in separating their country from their government. Doctors, nurses, police officers and teachers don’t think they’re working for Johnson. They are healing the sick, protecting the public, teaching the young. Civil servants are closer to party politics, but they justify implementing policies they privately think are mistaken by treating due process with religious reverence. Their duty is to serve a democratically elected administration, as the Johnson administration is, which respects the rule of law, which the Johnson administration does not. It writhes against constraints like an eel in a net. It launches hate campaigns against “activist lawyers” who commit the unpardonable crime of representing their clients. It will, if it gets the chance, repeal the Human Rights Act and limit judicial review as surely as it has persuaded parliament to sanction breaking the withdrawal treaty Johnson signed. The civil service code instructs civil servants to uphold integrity, honesty and objectivity. The Johnson administration has not just crossed those lines, it has ground them into the dust. An Economist investigation into why Dominic Cummings failed so comprehensively to update Whitehall’s infrastructure suggested that the trash political culture he promoted destroyed his grandiose dreams. Tech leaders and entrepreneurs refused to work with him or Johnson. Several said they had no interest in helping deliver the Brexit folly. I am sure the report is accurate and the wider point that populism is destroying a populist government’s ability to govern feels right too. To generalise, the people who know how to make this country work tend to be liberal with a small “l”. They do not like braggarts and liars and they respect the rules. The Johnson administration cannot attract them when its entire electoral strategy is based on abusing every principle they value. But government incompetence is as large a part of the explanation for its failure to keep talented people as its crass-right ideology. One of the achievements of the Cameron government was to stop throwing money at an oligopoly of state capitalist service companies and encourage Whitehall to build in-house teams to handle digital projects. You can see its successes in the revamped system for universal credit, which coped with the hundreds of thousands of applications after the virus hit. Cameron had a minister who understood the technology in Francis Maude and a charismatic head of the government digital service in Mike Bracken. Since 2015, the system has fallen apart. Johnson appointed ministers because they went along with the political correctness of the Brexit right, not because they could do the job. (For if careers in Britain depended on merit, where would he be?) Ads for a new chief digital office first appeared in 2019 but no candidate has yet been found. As one civil servant put it to me, the best geeks would accept one-third of the money they could earn in the private sector and sign on for a government contract for a few years – but only if they thought they would be free to develop worthwhile projects and could work with the best people. Under Johnson, they think know-nothing ministers and management consultants, whose practical usefulness is in inverse proportion to their lavish fees, will waste their time and push them around. Authoritarianism and stupidity aren’t opposites. They feed off each other. Priti Patel attacks immigration lawyers because she can’t run the Home Office and the Home Office cannot run a just immigration and asylum system. Johnson, Michael Gove and a large proportion of the Conservative press want to tear up judicial checks on the power of the state so the courts won’t expose their failures. We are used to thinking of authoritarianism as a sinisterly efficient system. Its British variant is sinister, but there’s nothing efficient about it: just a ragbag of chancers trying to cover their backsides and tearing up the rulebook as they do it. Like many others, Alex Thomas walked away. He now works at the Institute for Government, a thinktank that promotes the “efficient public administration of government and public service”. He’s got a tough job and it’s growing tougher by the day. Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist