New BBC TV political documentary on the years of Tory chaos

"We lost our minds." That unforgiving assessment is how a former government official who had one of the most important jobs in Britain, sums up the huge political turbulence that engulfed the UK between 2016 and 2022. It was, as she sees it, a collective meltdown in a country previously known for stability.

The decision then required the government and civil service to work out how to unplug the country from the framework it had followed for many decades, without a plan, and without political clarity.

The campaign made the splits ever more public and painful, carving the party into two deadly rival camps, and dragging in the whole country. ... With the governing party at war with itself, there was a desperate hunt for any weapon that would do, and creating controversy became a more and more convenient choice. ...

Elements in the Conservative Party made targets of the civil service, the law, Parliament (where it was actually in charge), and the "elite", even though that was essentially blaming their reflections in the mirror. Boris Johnson, with the help of Dominic Cummings, picked fights which drove his rivals round the twist, to dramatic effect. Bosses in Whitehall were their targets often - the drive to reform the civil service was not new, and necessary even, according to some insiders - but the brutal tactics they tried to use, blew up.
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The Conservatives spent much of the last six years treating each other as enemies, and hunting for other bogeymen - Brussels, Whitehall, even former Conservative governments. It was so messy because of the bad blood of the referendum campaign which seeped into the party and Parliament, compounded by Whitehall's struggle to manage the challenges of Brexit and the pressures of the pandemic.

Whitehall feels battered, depleted. Its vulnerabilities were laid so bare during the pandemic that confidence has fallen away in some quarters. And it's common now for politicians to target Whitehall as "the blob" - resistant to change, still accused of having never wanted Brexit at all.

At senior levels of the civil service there has long been an acknowledgement that the Rolls-Royce reputation of Whitehall may not be entirely deserved, and things have to change. But being the target of overt political attacks has hardly helped ease that along. On the other side, ministers privately wonder even if some departments are on a "go-slow", after all the drama, waiting out what might be left of this Conservative administration before a potential change next time round.

The programme is sprawling, yet it feels as though people are missing: the biggest characters in this carousel of chaos do not appear, and their absence is notable. There is also a strange disconnect, because most of the interviewees, particularly the politicians, talk about events as if they were mere spectators who just happened to be in the room at the time, rather than taking any responsibility.