8 In my work in the public sector over the last 20 years or more, one of the most familiar tropes is the exasperated crusade so many engage in to find better ways to collaborate within and across governments and between governments and the wider community. The trouble is that aspiration and hope seem to be inversely proportional to experience and performance. We want it but can’t ever seem to really deliver it. Except in a good crisis. Work with pretty much any public sector leadership team after a flood or fire or similar natural cataclysm and the talk will be all admiration and yearning for the kind of instinctive collaboration that suddenly breaks out, at least so long as the emergency lasts. Then, the story will go, the status quo reasserts itself and that amazing sharing of data and expertise, of mutual accommodation of interests and of political mutuality even across party lines evaporates and we’re back to the old games. So, is COVID19 big and brutal enough to buck that dispiriting trend? We’re getting some signals, at least, that perhaps this time around an emergency of these unprecedented volatility and dire proportions might just scare us all onto a more or less permanent better trajectory. If it’s both sensible and, it turns out, administratively possible to run a national cabinet and for the country to be run on a rare, but theoretically plausible …
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