But the dysfunction goes beyond the enforced benching of the government’s two most powerful players. As the UK seeks to present a united approach in tackling the coronavirus crisis, insiders said that the Vote Leave faction of political aides in Number 10, led by Cummings, was at war with Sedwill and other senior civil servants. The fallout blew up as Johnson’s allies blamed — both in private and in briefings to the media — the civil service for its lack of preparation for the pandemic.

In the early stages of the outbreak in January and February, Cummings and some Number 10 political aides saw the issue chiefly as one for officials and public health experts to get on top of, multiple sources said. That didn’t happen, they believed, and this exacerbated what they saw as a failure by the Department of Health and Public Health England over several years to prepare for a pandemic, leaving the UK to start from a significantly lower base than other countries like Germany on issues such as testing and ventilators.

But officials across Whitehall accused Johnson’s political team of not taking the virus seriously until the last few weeks and of providing a lack of leadership on what was the main issue facing the country.

A minister told BuzzFeed News: “There have been many competing command structures. Number 10, government departments, especially DHSC, NHS national-level leadership, NHS trusts, Public Health England and groups of academic experts inside government. They are not integrated clearly, there is no real sense of who is in charge, they each have their own interests, and they have spent weeks contradicting each other. I would be surprised to see Public Health England continue in its current form after this.”

The political-civil service divide worsened two weeks ago, insiders said, when Sedwill attempted to “restructure” the government’s coronavirus response by putting senior officials in charge of a centralised team responsible for day-to-day management of the crisis. This “power grab” resulted in political advisers being “frozen out” of key decisions, one source claimed, adding that trust was at an “all-time low”.

Raab’s accession to acting prime minister while Johnson is in hospital has not yet cleared things up. While the foreign secretary has won praise internally for stepping up in extremely difficult circumstances, it remains unclear whether he is formally in charge, as aides and officials continued to squabble, insiders said, while senior officials used the situation to further expand their own influence. There have been calls to formalise Raab’s position while the prime minister is on the mend.

Conservative MPs are also beginning to worry that Johnson’s election-winning agenda is now out of the window and that the civil service will use the coronavirus to curb Cummings’ dream of imprinting his worldview on British public life for a generation.

“The post-election policy agenda on which we won such a huge mandate could now be ruined. What can be saved is an unresolved question,” an MP said, raising the question of whether senior aides would want to stick around, should the pandemic dominate the next two years of UK politics and shift public opinion towards greater state intervention in the economy. They also said that ministers and departmental aides not on the frontline coronavirus fight have found themselves with nothing to do as their briefs were removed from the agenda.

One Whitehall insider said they thought the relationship between Downing Street and the civil service was beyond repair: “Number 10 advisers think the civil service are a bunch of wets who failed to prepare and got us into the worst crisis since World War II. The civil service thinks Number 10 advisers are a load of idiots and lunatics who shouldn’t be anywhere near power.”