Whitehall rebels over ‘brutish’ Gordon Brown

The report, Shaping Up: A Whitehall for the Future, was overseen by Sir Michael Bichard, a former permanent secretary, and will be published tomorrow. Some of the startlingly frank observations by civil servants include:

- Downing Street lacks a coherent strategy and is reduced to issuing "barmy ideas" as it squabbles with the Treasury. Giving No 10 greater powers would inflict only more harm on the country.

- Ministers have lost their grip: "The machine is starting to pull away from them. There is a sense that you are at the end of an era."

- The Treasury has given up on its duty to control public spending because it has been "hijacked and turned into a social policy department, a welfare department, a reducing international debt department, an everything-under-the-sun department".

The grim diagnosis emerged as a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times put the Tories on 40% with a nine-point lead over Labour, at 31%, both unchanged on last month and with Labour holding on to the gains that it had made in the wake of the pre-budget report. The Liberal Democrats are up two points at 18%.

Brown has seen a 10-point increase in his personal ratings, suggesting that the recent botched leadership coup may have boosted his popularity. However, he remains less popular than David Cameron or Nick Clegg.

The Institute for Government recorded a series of anonymous interviews with senior civil servants, most of whom have worked for Labour throughout its 13 years in power. The Sunday Times has seen interviews given to the institute that are considered too frank for inclusion in the final report and has also spoken to officials.

The mandarins express their frustration at a lack of vision from No 10, coupled with an obsessive attempt to micro-manage policy.

"It's no great secret that Gordon is not strategic," one figure told The Sunday Times, while another said Downing Street and its secretariats were "a cacophony of silence and confusion". A third remarked: "The centre [No 10] is certainly dysfunctional and the Cabinet Office is fragmented."

The report concludes: "The office of the British prime minister holds a concentration of formal power greater than that of almost any other country in the developed world.

"In contrast, the fragmentation and lack of co-ordination at the centre of the civil service - the Treasury, No 10 and the Cabinet Office - leads to an administrative centre that is relatively weak. This curious situation has created a strategic gap at the heart of British government which inhibits the ability to set overall government priorities and translate them into action."

In unpublished research gathered by the institute, the director-general in one Whitehall department said: "What comes out of No 10 is lots of barmy ideas. It's the worst possible kind of policy making, which is 'here is a problem, let's have a kneejerk reaction to it tomorrow on what we're going to announce' and quite frankly the less contact with No 10 the better."

A former government figure said that at one stage the Treasury felt it could rein in Downing Street only by sending memos totting up the amount of spending commitments that No 10 had made each week. Another director-general told the institute: "All the worst bits of policy making come from the centre. It's these people who think you change the world by publishing a strategy. And you don't change a thing by publishing a strategy, it makes no difference whatsoever."

The report finds: "There is a gap at the centre of Whitehall - a conspicuous lack of a single coherent strategy for government as a whole."

It adds: "Many interviewees felt highly ambivalent about more assertive co-ordination from the centre. While they wanted stronger leadership, they were also concerned about the potential for micro-management and poorly co-ordinated central initiatives."

It quoted one interviewee's "strident" comment that adding to Downing Street's powers would only harm the country further: "I think making the centre bigger would be a disastrous thing to do, because what that would do is mean that you've got a bigger problem to manage. At least keeping it small means there's only so much damage that can be done."

One retired mandarin who has worked for every premier since Margaret Thatcher said the bunker mentality was worse than at any stage under the Tories or Blair. He said: "It's worse than under previous prime ministers. With Blair they did invite you to meetings, but not with Brown. They contracted into a little bunker."

He added: "I had a very good working relationship with Downing Street under Blair but that changed when Brown came in and it contracted to a very small circle of people. You just got orders from Downing Street, not consultation, and that is still continuing today."

As the country grapples with the collapse of the national finances, there will be alarm at the criticism of the Treasury's loss of focus. Although the report does not blame Brown by name, he was in charge for a decade as chancellor of the exchequer.

One mandarin said the Treasury was failing to control public spending because it was trying to interfere in everything else: "The only thing it did not do was try to control public expenditure and try to get value for money from it, or set any sensible objectives."

This weekend Bichard said: "The civil service and politicians must work better together for the whole of government. There is still a lack of corporate endeavour, despite great efforts to change that."

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "We will obviously study the report with interest. But we do not accept the conclusion on Cabinet Office, No 10 and HM Treasury co-ordination."