Can our new champion tame the Eurocrats? NOW TO MORE serious matters - Part Two of Whitehall's desk wars. I fear there is growing pressure on Sir Bob Kerslake, the new, part-time head of the Civil Service. There seems to be mutiny among the mandarins over his appointment, and nor are MPs happy. As I reported last week, Sir Bob thought he had bagged a posh office next to that of Sir Jeremy Heywood, the new Cabinet Secretary. Yet there is another claimant to this prestigious perch - Foreign Office grandee Sir Kim Darroch, the new, full-time National Security Adviser. Now Sir Bob's appointment is about to come in for criticism from a different quarter. Tomorrow MPs on the Public Administration Select Committee are expected to give the thumbs down to the whole idea of Sir Bob spending two days a week as head of the Civil Service and then pushing off for the rest of the week to be permanent secretary at the local government department. Such a verdict would hardly be a surprise. Former cabinet secretaries - Lords Armstrong, Butler, Turnbull, Wilson - practically queued up in the Commons committee corridor to condemn the new part-time arrangements. One of the most damning indictments came from Professor Tony Dean, a former cabinet secretary and the head of the civil service in Ontario, who flew from Canada specially to speak to MPs. He told of "a national organisation with some 450,000 workers... something like £700 billion running through the hands of those at the senior levels of this organisation ... its work affects every aspect of people's lives. Would we look at an organisation of one tenth the size and influence and think about giving the leadership to a part-time executive officer? I think not. A persuasive argument. Yet this tussle is about power and status, not just part-timers in top jobs. For more than 30 years cabinet secretaries have also been heads of the Civil Service. Such was the standing of any cabinet secretary that nobody minded if his duties as head of the Civil Service were delegated to others. Sir Jeremy, however, refused to combine the two jobs - and plenty of people minded about Sir Bob taking on the role part-time. Sir Bob, former boss of Sheffield council, is new to Whitehall. He has only been a permanent secretary for a year, yet he will be doing appraisals of other, much more senior, permanent secretaries. "How's he going to know whether his colleagues are doing their jobs properly when he has so little experience of being a permanent secretary himself?" asked one insider. Phrases like "over-promoted" and "hang him out to dry" and even "mincemeat" are floating around. Yet even Sir Bob's critics concede that he is an able manager and a good political operator. "He's no pushover," says one senior figure. If he's not given the respect and status he wants, he won't stay. That will blow the whole thing out of the water. Yet some are canvassing the possibility of Sir Bob giving up his permanent secretary job - a compromise he himself might welcome. Even then, he would still have an uphill task to establish his authority. Before retiring as cabinet secretary last month, Sir Gus O'Donnell, now ennobled, had in his office the ultimate accessory for any Whitehall knight. His family clubbed together to buy him a replica medieval armoured helmet, as worn by the knights of old. Perhaps Sir Bob could borrow it to chair the perm secs" Wednesday morning meetings. MICHAEL GOVE, the Education Secretary, wants to make it easier to sack poor teachers - but he may need to take a long-term view. I once asked the late, great Sir Alec Clegg, chief education officer of the West Riding of Yorkshire, how he dealt with bad teachers. There was a long pause. "What I say is this," he replied at last. While there's death, there's hope.