Whitehall mandarins must stop being so defensive These are all powerful arguments and Mrs Hodge did herself no favours by bullying some of the civil servants who came before her committee. Yet she has highlighted some large holes in the system: when there are serious foul-ups in government, ministers say "Not me guv," claiming they did not know what their civil servants were doing. Officials then claim that they were only following the wishes of their political masters and, anyway, they are not allowed to defend themselves in public. Ministers and mandarins both slide out from under. This week even Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said that the issue of accountability needed to be addressed, adding that "old institutions like the Home Office and the Civil Service" must adapt. She even quoted, with approval, one of the arguments put forward by Mrs Hodge, who said that when the present system was set up in 1918 there had only been 28 civil servants in the Home Office. Today there are more than 30,000 - and how could any minister possibly know and answer for what they were all doing? They may be on different sides politically, but Hodge and May are wicked women when it comes to statistics. Their numbers may look impressive but the debate is not about junior staff, it is about members of the senior Civil Service. They are the ones who advise on policy or take major decisions. At present there are 205 of them in the Home Office - not that much of an increase in almost 100 years. All the same, Whitehall needs to stop defending the status quo quite so strongly and start devising some new ground rules. They may hate Mrs Hodge grandstanding but she and Mr Graham are in tune with a new age of openness. Why not start publishing civil service advice? It should not be attributed to individual, named civil servants, and Whitehall is right to say that ministers and officials must, as Lord O'Donnell told MPs this week, "have some private space where they can disagree - violently if necessary." But couldn't the Government publish the background facts and figures given to ministers, as well as the options put forward by the Civil Service and the advantages and disadvantages of each? If officials have made errors or left out an option, the rest of us can point it out, and ministers can defend their choices. It might actually make for a better standard of debate. And, as Mr Cameron told MPs this month, perhaps what is also needed is more openness of who decides what, when and why, so that there is a trail to follow when, as he put it, "things go wrong in government, as they always do." PS: The world of Sir Humphrey is not dead. On Theresa May's desk is a secure phone for emergencies only. "The first time it rang I picked it up with real trepidation," she says. "A voice said 'hello? is that Specsavers?""