Based purely on my experience alone many of them wouldn't survive in the outside word, something bemoaned by the people they bring in from the experienced outside on a frequent basis I remember.

The desire to slavishly follow (wasteful) protocol and shy from innovation and evolution was at times shocking. Like Jon says above, don't you dare show you care!

Rant over!

In my experience it's very much frowned upon to really show you care about the topic at hand, although you should spend enormous numbers of hours working on whatever it is if you are to keep your bosses happy... Strange way of motivating people.

Pseudonyms can be useful precisely because they focus on what is said in one place and can disconnect it from what is said in another. I do not speak here for my employer, my government or my country. Pseudonymity reduces the risk that anyone might t...

The thing was we all knew that she was likely to run into problems, in part because there's a myth about the civil service and how it presents itself to the general public. Anyone who has worked in or alongside government will have seen many things that they could recognise in Civil Serf, even if they don't share the same frustrations. But once she'd attracted the attention of the press the end was inevitable.

One other thing. She's not the first civil servant to run into trouble for blogging. I remember there was another short-lived blog a couple of years ago which covered similar territory and while it didn't get the Daily Mail treatment one day it was there the next...