Prominent Conservative Leave campaigner and select committee chairman Bernard Jenkin has spoken out against calls to politicise the top ranks of the civil service following the resignation of Britain's Brussels ambassador Sir Ivan Rogers.
Rogers stepped aside as the UK's permanent representative to the European Union earlier than expected this week, with a resignation note to colleagues urging them to "continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking" as Britain prepares to begin talks with fellow member states on its exit from the EU.
But his resignation triggered a furious political row, with some jubilant eurosceptics, including UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, calling for a "complete clear out" of the Foreign Office and the appointment of pro-Brexit officials.
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As a chorus of former senior civil servants, including two ex-heads of the FCO, took to the airwaves to defend Rogers' right to give frank advice, ministers were also accused of failing to defend the model of an impartial civil service from increasingly strident attacks.
In the event, a career diplomat, Sir Tim Barrow, was handed the job of succeeding Rogers, an appointment that instantly came under fire from some Brexit campaigners.
But Jenkin, who founded the Vote Leave campaign and serves as chair of the powerful parliamentary committee scrutinising the work of the civil service, has now written in defence of an impartial bureaucracy, and backed the appointment of the former Foreign Office political director Barrow as the UK's top EU envoy.
"As a founder of the Vote Leave campaign, it is hard to argue that I have been captured by Britain’s political establishment," he wrote in the Financial Times.
"But I regard the idea of scrapping the permanent and impartial civil service with horror — as would those former permanent secretaries grumbling in public about the government’s strategy."
However, Jenkin cautioned ex-civil servants against complaining too loudly about the government's handling of the Brexit process, saying such figures seemed "unaware that, with their complaints, they are making the case against an impartial civil service" in the eyes of the public.
" The mandarins are playing into the stereotype that there is a collective establishment view on great issues, such as Brexit, which they feel entitled, even duty bound to defend."
Jenkin sought to remind officials of the "distinction between telling truth to power" and "attempting to maintain an expired consensus against the wishes of the government of the day".
But the senior Tory MP – whose Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee is part-way through a fresh inquiry into the structure and skills of the civil service – hit back against those who argued the civil service is not up to the job of taking Britain out of the EU.
The PACAC chairman said the Northcote-Travelyan model of an impartial civil service, in place for 150 years, had "underpinned constitutional stability and brought the UK through many crises, including two world wars", adding: "Have no doubt, it will deliver Brexit too."
Jenkin said it was "no surprise" that exiting the European Union was "generating some unhappiness among officials", pointing out that previous radical shifts in policy, including Margaret Thatcher's monetarist economic policies and the original 1970s decision to join the European Economic Community had been met with initial unease by officials.
And while he described resignation as "the only honourable option" for officials who did not feel able to serve the government as it shifts its European policy, he urged greater understanding between civil servants and ministers.
"The policy of the government and the civil service should be that everyone should be forgiven, everyone should listen and be heard, and everyone understood," he wrote.
"Things may take a bit longer but the government needs to retain experience where it can.
"There can be no substitute for the trust between ministers and civil servants. Without it, government will be blinded and hindered by the fog of mistrust."
Jenkin's intervention comes after two former Conservative cabinet ministers launched highly-personal attacks on Rogers, with ex-Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers branding his resignation note "rambling" and "emotionally needy", while former welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith said it had been "verging on the pompous" and showed "sour grapes".