Boris has got off to a flying start with a revolution in Whitehall

To the victor, the spoils. Having returned to Downing Street from a post-election pilgrimage to Sedgefield that crowned his victory with a display of humility, a triumphant Boris Johnson is not only already back at his desk, but banging it with his fist.

The first department to feel his ire is the Ministry of Defence, which stands accused of wastage. It is already clear that this will be a very different Government from those of the Cameron and May era. A Prime Minister who owes his majority to the cloth cap won’t hesitate to send brass hats tumbling in the dust.

He has learnt from past mistakes, too. After winning the 2016 referendum, Boris Johnson spent the weekend relaxing with his family, despite having a Tory leadership campaign to fight. As a result, his colleague Michael Gove concluded that he wasn’t serious about being Prime Minister — and decided that he himself would be better qualified. The rest is history. Britain wasted three years under Theresa May before Boris got back on track.

Not this time. He has not only hit the ground running but, like the JCB digger he was filmed driving last week, looks ready to smash barriers to reform. This administration is not content to stalk the corridors of power; it intends to demolish many of them.

Dominic Cummings, his chief strategist, is known to believe that the civil service is idle and incompetent. The gentlemen in Whitehall may think they know best, but they are up against players who are rewriting the rules of the game. Cummings sees no point in tinkering with the Government machine. He’d rather blow it up.

There is an apparent contradiction here. The Conservatives made fewer and less extravagant promises than the other parties, which is one reason why voters found them more credible. But they did pledge to end austerity and to provide remedies for the neglected corners of the kingdom. That is bound to mean a bigger state, not a smaller one. The Tories may have no time for the mandarins of Whitehall, whose culture of caution is inimical to the permanent revolution that is now to be instigated by Cummings & Co. But who else is going to put their policies into practice?

The time-honoured answer is to draft into Whitehall the brightest and best, not just from the private sector but from all walks of life: business and commerce, the media and the universities, local government and the voluntary sector. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both did this and Boris Johnson has already recruited John Bew, an acclaimed historian, to be his foreign policy adviser in Downing Street. Bew is, perhaps significantly, the biographer of Clement Attlee, the former major who created the welfare state largely from scratch. The scourge of the Labour Party is only too happy to learn from its most effective Prime Minister.

For all its faults, the British civil service has proved itself over centuries to be the least corrupt and most efficient bureaucracy in the world. Properly led and with an infusion of talent from the world outside, it has achieved amazing things. It built up the largest and least evil empire the world has ever seen — and then dismantled it. The problem is not so much the civil service as Whitehall. They are by no means the same thing.

Unlike the French state, the British one has never crushed the provinces; neither has it ignored the “flyover states” like Washington DC. But during our four decades in the EU Whitehall has absorbed some of the grandiose ambitions of Brussels. It has “gold-plated” EU laws, multiplied its regulations and enforced them to the letter in ways that have often been grotesque.

Above all, London is just too powerful, and a rebalancing of centre and periphery is long overdue. Boris Johnson must delegate power to the regions and he knows it. Indeed, he seems determined to encourage free enterprise in what have hitherto been socialist cities.

This will require a cultural as well as an administrative revolution. What the reformers are up against was crystallised in a comment attributed to Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, by her former colleague Caroline Flint, who lost her seat, Don Valley, last week: “I’m glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours.” The remark has been vehemently denied by the Islington MP, but it was all too plausible and the damage has been done. We shall see whether the Labour Party will learn its lesson, but the Prime Minister must banish such attitudes from Whitehall for good.