Whitehall insiders fear Scholar’s dismissal on Tuesday will have a chilling effect on the public service and make officials less likely to speak “truth to power”. Truss also removed her national security adviser Sir Stephen Lovegrove in her first week in Downing Street and is widely expected to replace Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, in the coming weeks. Scholar’s immediate dismissal sent shockwaves through the upper echelons of the civil service. Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA, the union of senior civil servants, called it an “ideological purge of permanent secretaries”. Lord Peter Ricketts, former head of the Foreign Office, said: “We are starting to move towards an American-style politicization of top jobs. “The whole point of permanent secretaries was that they would provide continuity and expertise, since they did not belong to individual ministers. They would be more likely to speak truth to power.” During the Tory leadership contest Truss denounced the “orthodoxy” and “abacus economy” of the Treasury. Kwasi Kwarteng, the new chancellor, agreed and fired Scholar shortly after Truss appointed him to the Treasury on Tuesday night. “The chancellor has decided it is time for new leadership at the Treasury and so I will be stepping down with immediate effect,” Scholar said. While it is not unusual for new prime ministers and chancellors to want to change their top officials, they usually wait a few months before calling for the changes. During a 30-year career in the public service — including six years in the top job at the Treasury — Scholar worked on projects such as Bank of England independence and David Cameron’s renegotiation with the EU. He also helped deal with the impact of the 2008 financial crisis and supported former chancellor Rishi Sunak in developing the Covid emergency support programs at the start of the pandemic in 2020, including the furlough scheme. He was also known internally as a capable and likeable administrator who helped ensure the Treasury was able to weather other major economic shocks, including Brexit and the energy crisis. Lord Nick Macpherson, Scholar’s predecessor as permanent secretary to the Treasury, said the Treasury “has always had a variety of views with some of the more unorthodox interventions of recent years – in 2008 and 2020 – heavily influenced by Tom Scholar’.

Macpherson said the Treasury had always been pro-growth and said if there was an orthodoxy in the building it reflected the importance of competitive markets, low barriers to trade and keeping government borrowing costs down. “Maybe [the Treasury] he has an old-fashioned view that a stable macroeconomic framework coupled with stability is one of the conditions for growth,” said Macpherson. He added that the danger of firing respected figures like Scholar is that “it will promote orthodoxy rather than undermine it, but it will be yes man orthodoxy”. Sajid Javid, former chancellor, tweeted his thanks to Scholar for his “outstanding work across government over 30 years”. George Osborne, another former Tory chancellor, told Global’s News Agents podcast this month: “All this talk of war on the civil service is pathetic from the Tory party and it’s the incoherence of government policy, not public servants. , which failed.” The Cabinet Office said: “Impartiality is one of the fundamental values ​​of the civil service code.”