Integrity of the Civil Service,

 Jane Merrick, policy editor of the i newspaper, reported yesterday:

The impartiality and integrity of the Civil Service is being put at risk, due to the rows involving Nadhim Zahawi and Boris Johnson's financial arrangements, insiders have told i.

The Cabinet Secretary,, Simon Case, and Whitehall's propriety and ethics team have been dragged into both affairs because civil servants offered advice on the arrangements.

Yet Whitehall insiders said that because full official advice to ministers - with qualifications - cannot be made public, disclosures about Mr Johnson and Mr Zahawi's financial affairs being approved are undermining the integrity of the Civil Service.

It surely does not help that there has been no recent head of the Home Civil Service who has come up through the ranks of at least the administrative grades of the service. The last such was Richard Wilson (now Baron Wilson of Dinton), Tony Blair's first appointee, who joined as an assistant principal (AP) in 1966. Since then, there have been five Cabinet Secretaries (Turnbull, O'Donnell, Heywood, Sedwill and Case). They have all previously filled senior roles in organisations at least linked to government but none, I suggest, imbued with the traditional civil service ethos. Simon Case is on particularly dodgy ground. He was involved in "partygate" and, a worse transgression, was compliant in the political sacking of a respected colleague, Tom Scholar.

The appointment of the top civil servant is necessarily a political decision and the selection will optimally be of one who is congenial to the elected administration. However, I suggest that appointing someone from outside the ranks of the service puts in question the traditional "Chinese wall" between politicians and the executive.