Labour’s cowboy ministers may be losing the will to live down in Brighton but back at the ranch in Whitehall I hear that top civil servants have started an all too lively fightback against Sir Gus O’Donnell’s proposal for a “revolution” in spending. Sir Gus, cabinet secretary and head of the home civil service, has been talking – in public – about making government departments pool their cash in order to tackle issues such as obesity, climate change and Alzheimer’s disease. The aim would be to force departments to work together more effectively. Some of Sir Gus’s fellow mandarins are not keen. “A number of the permanent secretaries are very concerned,” says one insider. “They are saying hold hard.” You can see their point. The scheme seems to be more full of holes than the McLaury brothers after the gunfight at OK corral.

For a start, if there are people from four or five different parts of Whitehall in a ring-fenced, multi-departmental team, which of them is going to be accountable? You can just hear the cries of “Not me, guv ... er, Prime Minister. It was the rest of them who fouled up.” Sounds like a glorious recipe for everyone – politicians as well as civil servants – to blame everyone else when things go wrong.