Early in July, Conservative MP Mark Francois had some clear advice for chief of the defence staff General Sir Nick Carter: “Please nip back to the department and ask them to sort their bloody selves out. Because if not, Cummings is going to come down and sort you out his own way, and you won’t like it.” The context was defence procurement, one of those perennial bureaucratic problems. The professional head of the armed forces gave a wry smile in response, no doubt already aware of what would be published in the Sydney Morning Herald hours later, that Dominic Cummings was to visit top-secret MOD sites including the SAS and Porton Down.

For those who abhor government waste, the MOD is an easy target, and although the long-promised assault on this department has been put to rest by Covid-19, there is definitely a feeling that it will resurface when the delayed integrated security, defence and foreign policy review comes out. Some action has, nonetheless, already been taken with the Department for International Development’s recent merger with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, forming the FCDO. Such action has proved popular with certain ardent supporters of civil service reform who might view a pandemic as the perfect opportunity to reset the entire structure of government. Yet a merger is not in itself out of the ordinary.

Since the Brexit referendum alone we have seen the …