BEFORE the prime minister's friend and guru Steve Hilton departed in May for a sabbatical in California, civil servants enjoyed gossiping about the adviser's latest bit of unorthodox conduct. One story had him turning up to a policy session in baggy shorts and messily peeling a ripe orange, to the consternation of the besuited officials.

Whitehall's Sir Humphreys (so-called after the Machiavellian civil-service boss in a long-running TV comedy, “Yes, Minister”) were even more appalled by Mr Hilton's disruptive ideas for their future. These included slashing parts of the civil service by up to 90% and encouraging outside agencies such as university departments and think-tanks to compete with it, tendering policy ideas to ministers and bidding for the job of carrying them out. At present, enacting policy is solely the domain of officials.

The problem many modern politicians say they have with the senior civil service is that it is hierarchical in nature, backward-looking in practice and accustomed to shielding its members behind a long-standing tradition that officials' dealings with ministers must remain confidential. The result, they say, is clever generalists with jobs for life, reluctant to change and with little experience of turning big ideas into practicalities.

Now that the fruit-eating Mr Hilton has gone, the task of reform falls back on to two more circumspect figures. They are Sir Jeremy Heywood, who is cabinet secretary (the official who most closely advises the prime minister), and Sir Bob Kerslake, an import from local government who has been made head of the domestic civil service. Within the next few weeks, the two are expected to set out a blueprint for alterations. Some of Mr Hilton's ideas look set for the cutting-room floor. Early signals are that the “outsourcing” of policy will be less dramatic than he intended. Sir Jeremy has made clear that he does not relish presiding over a clearing-house for external policy pitches. One cabinet-office figure suggests that the impact of any innovation here will be “at the margins of policy”, which sounds less than revolutionary.

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Frustration inside David Cameron's team over the slow delivery of reform has been mounting. Michael Gove, the radically inclined education secretary, was quick to ease out a number of civil servants in his department as he sought to free schools from local authorities. But Sir Jeremy, a veteran of Tony Blair's government, knows how to please impatient bosses. For his part, he wants to make it easier for the best civil servants to leap up the promotion scale, and for the truly enthusiastic to stick with important projects and become specialists. Sir Bob, his co-reformer, believes central government needs to learn from the best local authorities, encouraging people and agencies to cross established boundaries and work more effectively.

Some of the new thinking is imported from New Zealand which, under successive Labour and National Party governments in the late 1980s and early 1990s, transformed its officialdom. This included removing guaranteed tenure and issuing the heads and deputy heads of departments with performance agreements, on pain of being removed if they failed to make the grade. But British ministers are keen to avoid outright clashes at the moment, not least because Ian Watmore, a senior Whitehall figure Mr Cameron initially favoured, recently resigned amid rumours of disagreements over the reforms.

If one goal of the rethink is to ginger up officials another is to make the system more transparent and civil servants themselves less shadowy figures. Henceforth, it will be proposed, important policies will have the names of key officials attached to them, so civil servants will more easily be held responsible for their success. The reforms are also likely to give new powers to parliamentary select committees to hold senior officials to account.

There is an element in all this of wanting to shift the blame for ministerial mis-hits, such as a proposed holiday from national-insurance payments for small firms, which has had low take-up. Too many such ideas, ministers say, are poorly followed through. But others point out that bad policy calls—such as the “pasty tax” on warm food (now revoked), or the unpopular move to limit tax relief on charitable donations (under review)—are matters of political judgment. They will remain so, even if civil servants undergo a Promethean transition to optimum efficacy.

Far more important are areas where massive amounts of money, rather than ministerial reputations, are being lost. One example is the decade-long attempt to computerise medical records nationally, which has produced a cost overrun of several billion pounds, a colossal loss by the main IT-company involved and no functioning system. To avoid such fiascos, as well as to tighten notoriously lax defence procurement, high-flying civil servants will be sent off from September to the Said Business School in Oxford, to learn contracting skills from the private sector.

The result of these combined endeavours, says Peter Riddell of the Institute for Government, a think-tank, “won't be ambitious pyrotechnics, but will make a real impact on how government is delivered”. Mr Cameron has lost his most spirited ally in his attempt to remake Whitehall. His record on remaking the state will now rest on reforms being driven through by two figures at the top of the service he set out to change. Sir Humphrey would have been most amused by that.