The former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull is not alone. His criticisms of Gordon Brown are immensely damaging not only in their own right but because they are privately shared by many at the top of Whitehall.

I have heard half a dozen other current and even more recently retired permanent secretaries express almost exactly the same doubts about the closed and often ruthless way in which the Chancellor and his inner circle operate.

Whether Mr Brown’s style will change, and how, when he becomes Prime Minister has become a top priority for Sir Gus O’Donnell, the current Cabinet Secretary, and his fellow permanent secretaries. Their worries about a Brown government invariably come up in any conversation with senior civil servants.

The controversy yesterday about whether Lord Turnbull should have said what he did, and whether the remarks were intended to be off the record, background comments, is a secondary matter. Tony Blair’s spokesman expressed sharp official disapproval and senior civil servants fear that this episode will further strain relations with Cabinet ministers and with the Brown team.

In an ironic twist, Lord Turnbull was being treated yesterday by 10 Downing Street in the same dismissive way as in December 2005 he treated Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to the US, over his memoirs. Lord Turnbull attacked Sir Christopher for making “patronising and derogatory comments” about elected ministers he had been “paid handsomely” to serve. Lord Turnbull’s remarks are in a different context, but they are likely to be viewed in the same way by the Brown camp.

By chance, Lord Turnbull’s interview coincides with an very revealing BBC Radio 4 series Shape Up, Sir Humphrey in which Lord Turnbull, along with his two predecessors as Cabinet Secretary, Lords Butler of Brockwell and Wilson of Dinton, have publicly criticised new Labour’s style of government for being too centralist and narrow in policy decisions.

The impact of Lord Turnbull’s latest words in the Financial Times is even greater because he cannot be dismissed as either a Sir Humphrey Appleby-type of svelte manipulator (as in the Yes, Prime Ministerof the 1980s) or a small-conservative opposed to what the present Government has been doing.

Rather, the reverse is true. He is in many ways a curiously nonpolitical figure for someone who had two spells in 10 Downing Street as a private secretary in the Thatcher and Major eras and then had three years as Cabinet Secretary, until mid2005. Unlike, say, his contemporary Sir Hayden Phillips, the author of last week’s party funding report, he does not glide through the corridors, and salons, of power.

He has always been the gritty, often rather stubborn and proper former grammar-school boy from Enfield, who went to Cambridge and, after two years advising the Government of Zambia, spent most of his career at the Treasury.

Anyone who has talked to him knows he has strong views and is prepared to defend them. He was unusually personally committed for a senior civil servant, not in any partisan sense but to what he saw as good public policy and government. For instance, in his farewell lecture as Cabinet Secretary in July 2005, he expressed pride in his involvement in the miners’ strike of 1984-85 (in changing the course of history – “that economic change could not be resisted and that undemocratic trade unions had no place in Britain”).

Lord Turnbull linked this with his role in building a new macroeconomic system, and operational independence for the Bank of England, out of Black Wednesday in September 1992 and the wreckage of the European exchange-rate mechanism; and in “ending the constitutional nonsense” of the Lord Chancellor combining the roles of administering the criminal justice system, sitting as a judge and presiding over the Lords.

In his four years as Treasury Permanent Secretary, Lord Turnbull worked closely with Mr Brown, not as a member of his inner circle, but in repairing the serious strains that had developed under Sir Terry (now Lord) Burns, who is also very critical of the Brown style. Lord Turnbull helped to change the structure of the Treasury and its relations with departments.

Moreover, Lord Turnbull offended many Civil Service traditionalists, who thought he had “sold out”, by campaigning for the Cabinet secretaryship on a explicitly pro-reform, delivery platform. Like other candidates for the post, he had to submit a manifesto, which formed the basis of a statement of aims issued in June 2002, before he formally took over, which highlighted public service reform. He hived off some other duties, such as coordination of intelligence and security, and honours to other officials.

During his three years in office, he was criticised within Whitehall for identifying himself too closely with Mr Blair’s priorities and paying insufficient attention to the traditional role of the Cabinet Secretary as a political fixer and adviser to the Prime Minister.

He was not part of the inner 10 Downing Street circle, and only very belatedly became involved in sorting out the problems of what became the David Kelly affair. Instead, he was Mr, or rather Sir, Delivery, almost consciously the chief operating officer of new Labour plc.

In his Radio 4 interview, he noted Mr Blair’s resistance to suggestions for more formal procedures, that “look quite bureaucratic” like Cabinet committees, that “ultimately give you a better decision” (though the system was revamped after the 2005 election). He talked of “swimming against the tide”. And, as The Mail on Sunday reported in Janaury, he clashed with Cherie Blair over her acceptance, as the Prime Minister’s wife, of cut-price designer clothes and of a sizeable speaking fee for an interview about life in No 10.

However, Lord Turnbull was dismissive of ethical worries about the growing number of special advisers. He regarded these fears as exaggerated since, based on his own experience in the Treasury, he claimed that civil servants could work perfectly well alongside advisers. He not only publicly defended Mr Blair’s opposition to a Civil Service Act to protect officials, but also added his own personal objections. He feared that an Act would undermine the drive to reform and the Civil Service’s flexibility to adapt.

Consequently, Lord Turnbull frequently clashed with the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and Sir Alistair Graham, its chairman, who favoured stronger ethical safeguards. That is why Lord Turnbull’s intervention now is so explosive. He was for eight years a broadly sympathetic insider, agreeing with many of the policy goals of Mr Blair and Mr Brown, and eager to improve Civil Service performance.

What the interview reveals is a building up of frustration about the way Mr Brown and his advisers work. Lord Turnbull is not anti-Mr Brown for what he has done. His argument is that Mr Brown’s closed style of decision-making, excluding other ministers, has seriously undermined the cohesion and effectiveness of the Government. Few outside the tiny ranks of still committed communists would regard a reference to “sheer Stalinist ruthlessness” as a compliment.

In private, many ministers and officials yesterday agreed. There are many stories about the brutal way in which the Brown inner circle has squashed anyone who dissents from their viewpoint.

Shriti Vadera, one of his advisers, is renowned in Whitehall for her domineering and often downright rude style of treating officials from other departments.

Even a public ally such as David Miliband had a bruising experience last autumn when a paper outlining options for green taxes was leaked (not by him), and the Treasury advisers hit back ferociously. Within the Treasury, ambitious civil servants know that their careers depend on being seen as ultra-loyal and committed to the Chancellor.

There is another side to the picture. His strategic insights and clarity are admired and many Treasury civil servants who have won his trust admire him. And his defenders point to his economic record and policy successes in reducing child and pensioner poverty.

The question now is whether Mr Brown can change when he becomes prime minister. Can he be more collegial? Can he really delegate and consult more? Or will he just import his Treasury style into 10 Downing Street? Sir Stephen Wall, the Prime Minister’s former European adviser and a critic of Mr Brown’s approach, raised the question yesterday: “Is Gordon Brown capable of operating with the trust and transparency that is necessary for good Cabinet government?”

The challenge now for Sir Gus O’Donnell and his fellow permanent secretaries is to help to reinvent Mr Brown as a postStalinist prime minister.

Colleagues on Brown

“ Brown states with absolute certainty what the position is, and defies contradiction, threatening anyone foolish enough to interrupt. [He] has personally built up the most powerful position . . . more centralised than that of any Chancellor of the Exchequer in history
Richard Wilson, former Cabinet Secretary December 2006

I must have tried 50 times to talk to Gordon Brown. I didn’t get so much as a phone conversation
Bob Kiley, former Transport Commissioner for London, August 2006

I do find Gordon very hard to negotiate with. Every time something is raised he becomes defensive, but you simply have to override it and say: “Look, I am trying to sort this out in the best interests of all of us”
David Blunkett, The Blunkett Diaries

Brown is deluded . . . In his mind, he’s the heir presumptive. Other people accept it mainly because of his record as Chancellor but he doesn’t have rights in this – he has to earn them.
Charles Clarke, former Home Secretary, September 2006

Allowing Gordon Brown into No 10 would be like letting Mrs Rochester out of the attic. He has no empathy with people”
Frank Field, former Labour welfare minister, February 2007

Getting information about the contents of Brown’s Budget was like drawing teeth . . . The Chancellor’s team was far more likely to volunteer the contents of budgets and other announcements to journalists than they were to communicate with their opposite numbers next door”
Derek Scott, former chief economic adviser to the Prime Minister, September 2004

Brown was very difficult to work with as Chancellor. It may be that once he gets the job he has always wanted he will suddenly be transformed into someone at ease with himself, even trusting of people around him. But the experience of those he has worked with him gives cause for concern
Lance Price, March 2007

You got the very clear impression from the view of people in No 10 that they could not govern without Gordon, but they could not really govern with him either
Sir Stephen Wall, former foreign affairs adviser, Blair: The Inside Years, BBC2, March 2007

Turnbull on ‘Stalin’ Brown

“ There has been the absolute ruthlessness with which Gordon has played the denial of information as an instrument of power. He has maintained an iron grip on spending and on the distribution to departments.

But in terms of the relationship with colleagues, Gordon has a very cynical view of mankind and of his colleagues. He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it, and ‘they will get what I decide’. And that is an extremely insulting kind of process.

Three days before the Budget you get this letter saying ‘this is what I am giving you and here are your public services agreements’. Do those ends justify the means? It has enhanced Treasury control, but at the expense of any government cohesion and any assessment of strategy. You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all.

The surprising thing about the Treasury is the more or less complete contempt with which other colleagues are held.

[He] has a Macavity quality. He is not there when there is dirty work to be done.

Stalin on Stalin

“ It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything

I believe in one thing only, the power of human will

I trust no one, not even myself

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed

Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union

Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs

History shows that there are no invincible armies

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it

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