Dominic Cummings’ legacy was vindicated today, after Labour all-but confessed he was right about one thing: the Civil Service is fundamentally broken and damaging Britain.

They of course didn’t put it in the same brutal, coarse terms that Mr Cummings does, but the very announcement about planned reforms concedes that the Tory frustration with Whitehall over the past few years were not a fantasy excuse.

The battles between the last five years of Tory rule and the civil service have been well-documented. From the Brexit battles, to obfuscation over stopping the boats, to opposition to bringing down immigration, to more obvious signals of bias such as woke rainbow lanyards and pro-Palestine badges.

During all these verbal battles between the Conservatives and Whitehall, Labour would not tire of claiming they were merely the government ‘making excuses’ when they failed to deliver change, or a new front in the imagined right-wing ‘culture war’.

Just five months into government, however, and Labour has realised this was far from the case.

In his big relaunch speech last week, Sir Keir Starmer sparked fury from the civil servants’ union when he dared criticise their attitude to the radical changes this country requires.

Speaking at Pinewood Studios, the PM warned: “Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

This was met with instant backlash, as mandarins accused him of using “Trumpian language”.

One civil servant even briefed to ITV’s Robert Peston that it makes our unelected work-shy elite want to “pull the plug on him”, as if that would win over public and political sympathy.

Today, the deputy Prime Minister in all but name Pat McFadden outlined new plans to try and revamp Whitehall with the sort of entrepreneurial mindset found in Silicone Valley tech start ups.

This involves £100 million in funding for new local hubs which will be allowed to follow a “test and learn culture”, where instead of aiming for perfection first time around they will be given the freedom to explore multiple ways of achieving the preferred outcome, and given the freedom to try new methods which may not succeed.

Mr McFadden also aped Mr Cummings’s attempts to hire new bright sparks from outside the typical civil servant recruitment pool – the former’s infamous ‘weirdos and misfits’ campaign being jokingly referenced by the press pack. The Government appears not to have thought about how to attract these bright sparks from a notoriously high-paying industry to the civil service where salaries are appalling poor.

I think both of these are ultimately doomed to fail. £100 million in the scope of government spending is an absolute drop in the ocean. A new mindset is welcome, but the “test and learn culture” is not the biggest problem Whitehall has.

We once ruled 1/3 of the world’s globe with a minuscule civil service when compared to today. It strikes me that three of the biggest problems are: too many civil servants creating work for themselves; pursuing their own agenda which is shaped by too many regulations and legal requirements; and a total lack of sufficient political input and steerage.

A good, cheap start would be to significantly increase the number of political appointees in each department, and the number and powers of Special Advisors.

But faults with Labour’s new plan aside, today was a major concession on what the Tories – and particularly Cummings – were trying to warn for years.

Our political system is broken, and Civil Servants are not going to give up their luxurious, laid back and powerful lifestyles without a major fight.