Hello, it's Monday morning, and this is a special bonus episode of Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government.

So why are we back in the studio? We're here because on Saturday morning 10 a.m.

Sir Philip Rutnam quit as the Home Office's permanent secretary. But he didn't just quit.

In an astonishing, unprecedented move, he gave an explosive press conference and announced his

intention to bring a case of constructive dismissal. None of us has seen anything like it.

So to take stock of what's happened, why it happened, what it means for the government,

we've assembled our crack production team, thank you,

and the IFG duo of Alex Thomas, who leads our work on the Civil Service,

and Kath Haddon, whose many hats at the Institute include leading our work on the role of ministers.

Kath, just last Thursday, we were here, right here in this studio, discussing the role of permanent

secretaries and how they worked with ministers and what makes for a good working relationship

and so on. And we knew there were problems in the home office, but what happened over the weekend?

Well, we don't know what happened behind the scenes and we can only assume that Sir Philip

Rutnam has been at least considering this course of action for some time. But it was, I mean, it was a massive shock.

I was, you know, sitting at home waiting for, to go off to my mother's house and then suddenly

everything seemed to go mad. Now we do know, don't we, or at least there have been reports that

there were at least a couple of meetings with the Cabinet Secretary, Mark said, well, last week, trying to sort out what had happened the clash between the permanent secretary and his secretary of state. Yeah, and Rutnam himself said in his statement that he had been offered a payoff and to go quietly but had decided not to do that and then wanted to bring this case of constructive dismissal instead.

So obviously he decided to go in the limelight.

You know, he'd got the cameras there.

He'd got sort of clearly was expecting to this to be a big bang moment.

So he in that sense knew what he was doing.

But it was a big shock to the rest of us.

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