Duracell

How might a re-structuring of the Civil Service work ?  Hundreds, if not thousands of civil servants have spent much of 2019 away from their home departments, directed to Brexit planning; that presumably ends for most of them on January 31st.

Dominic Cummings thinks that there's too much dead wood amongst the 400k, and that there should be a smaller core team of Top Ministers with bigger departments. Re-organisation provides opportunities to make people re-apply for jobs. Folding the Department for International Development into the Foreign Office is obvious. Could you bring Business and International Trade together - probably.

Is there room for an "Infrastructure Department" - perhaps combining bits of The Treasury, Transport, Housing, the broadband element of DCMS and more ? Is there someone convincing and brainy enough to square the circles of HS2, Heathrow runways and hospital building in a way that satisfies Dom, and makes sense to the 'new' Tory voters ?   It would surely be better to have one person responsible for both "north" and "south" investment plans, rather than endless competition between  smaller departments.

There's going to be bad news for all sorts of projects south of Manchester for some time, until the Northern Powerhouse gets a full set of batteries....