Hello and welcome to Coffee House. I'm James Hill. I'm joined today by Danny Kruger, the MP for East Wiltshire, and the head of performance preparations of government's unit.

Welcome, Danny. James. You've now been in the role for how long has it been about six months?

Yeah, yep, September till now.

And tell us what work you've been doing and how your thinking

has evolved, because I think you came into that role, very sceptical perhaps of how the state was

functioning. Is there anything that sort of changed your mind or any areas? Well, my scepticism

remains, and in fact it's been entrenched by the input I've been receiving, but I've been

encouraged by the quality of that input. So the fact is

you have in government, you know, a dysfunctional system staffed by a very mixed bag of people.

But in that mixed bag, there are some fantastic public servants who really do want to help

save our country and recognise how broken everything is. So obviously it's a minority who are

making contact with us, but I made it very clear we want to hear from people on a confidential

basis and we're not asking people to betray secrets or break the rules of their position, but to tell

us what doesn't work. And actually, we've had some very, very impressive input from the military establishment, the security

system, through to cabinet office and departments, people telling us, it doesn't matter which

ministers you have. At the moment, the permanent government remains the civil service establishment

who get their way by a combination of deliberate, I'm afraid to say, quite

malevolent action to frustrate what the politicians want, but also just through an inertia

and a sense that change is bad. The way we're doing things is the best way we can. And they

resist the legitimate, you know, democratically mandated decisions that ministers are trying to make.

So I've had contact from

labour people, including people who've left this administration, and ex-tories, current civil

...