Just months after stepping down from the most powerful job in Whitehall, Simon Case is building a public profile warning of doom and gloom across the world. Is it right that top civil servants take sides and scare the public after leaving office? And if he cares so much now, what did he do about it when he had the ear of successive prime ministers?
The headline was both alarming and a statement of the bleeding obvious. The next 20 years — said a man who was briefly a marine before a string of jobs in defence, the royal palace and for six prime ministers — will be dominated by conflict. Turn on the telly, take a peep at social media or graze the internet for a nanosecond this week and you’d struggle not to draw that conclusion yourself, without his PhD or civil service record. The world is, quite literally, on fire.
