Hello and welcome to the Rundown, a weekly podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and to discuss the government's perennial love affair with taking on the blob,

otherwise known as its own civil service, is Amy Leversage, Assistant General Secretary at the

FTA Union, which represents senior civil servants,

as well as Sam Friedman, former senior advisor in the Department for Education, and now Senior Fellow at the Institute of the Government,

as well as Becky Smith, deputy editor of our sister publication, Civil Service World.

So, Sam, I'm going to start with you by trying to explain what the blob is.

Obviously, the modern usage, I think, comes from Michael Gove, describing what he saw as sort of institutional resistance to his reforms.

You were of his advisor at the time. What do you kind of remember of his first use of the blob and how that kind of spread out?

So the blob has been used in the education world for a little while, first used by the US

education secretary William Bennett, and then it was taken over to Britain by Chris Woodhead,

who was Chief Inspector of schools in the late 90s, a very controversial chief inspector,

who was very anti-a-lot of the education establishment.

And he used the word, this phrase, the blob, to describe what he saw what he sort of the progressive left-wing educational

establishment and then when Michael Goves became education secretary he started using that term as well

to describe the sort of people who were opposed to his policies I personally never liked the phrase

but then I'm a kind of policy won't, not a comms person,

but I always thought it was unnecessarily aggravating because there were actually quite a lot of

people in the education sector who supported the reforms.

And it made it feel like it was sort of bits of Alex Ferguson us against them,

um, rather than something where you could bring a lot of people along with you.

But that's where it sort of came from.

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