The two government departments created to take Britain out of the EU have filled 80 per cent of their senior posts, the head of the civil service said on Wednesday, calming fears that civil servants are reluctant to work on Brexit.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, told MPs that some 65 senior jobs had been filled at the Department for Exiting the EU led by David Davis and the ministry for International Trade led by Liam Fox.

He said the speed with which the posts had been filled showed that the civil service was “mobilising very quickly” to face what many see as its biggest challenge since the second world war.

Theresa May has been criticised for setting up the two new departments by some mandarins and Whitehall experts, who argue that it would have been better to implement a more modest reshuffling of the Whitehall furniture.

Some civil servants would have preferred an expansion of the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office to deal with Brexit.

But Sir Jeremy said that the enthusiasm with which civil servants were queueing up to join the two new ministries was encouraging.

“We have so many people who want to work in these departments that we have to make sure that all the other important policy priorities of the new prime minister can be properly staffed,” he told MPs on the public administration and constitutional affairs committee.

Sir Jeremy also said the civil service was being inundated by applications from “many, many hundreds” of external consultancies, accountancy firms and project management specialists who want to work with the government on the Brexit agenda.

At a time of public spending restraint, he said the civil service needs to think carefully about when was the right time to hire external expertise. He said there was no point hiring expensive talent in areas like trade negotiations “until we are starting that process.” He added: “Having lots of expensive and capable people on our books in advance of need is something to be avoided.”

Pressed over whether the civil service could have done more contingency planning for Brexit before the referendum, Sir Jeremy said he and his colleagues had done “a significant amount of thinking and all that work is extremely valuable now.”

He said the main difference from the preparation that Whitehall does before a general election was that David Cameron had prevented civil servants from talking to the Leave campaign. But he said that discussions with the leading Leave campaigners would not have made much difference to the civil service’s preparations, given the absence of a clear blueprint for Brexit.

David Fuller's view

There are two interesting points here.  1) The Dickensian fantasy of innumerable legal experts pouring over the endless minutiae of intertwined regulations was created by the EU to deter any country from attempting to leave its clutches.  2) From the penultimate sentence above: “… David Cameron had prevented civil servants from talking to the Leave Campaign.”

Was David Cameron planning to succeed the unsteady Jean-Claude Junker as President of the European Commission?  We know that George Osborne was planning to become Prime Minister after Cameron left the office well before the next general election in 2020.

“There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.”  Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881)