Civil servants avoid Brown's phone calls?

There is a rather enlightening piece in this morning's Times about how everything at Downing Street has changed since Brown took over. In the old days, Downing Street stayed up late and got up late, apparently it now goes to bed early and gets up early. The night shift staff now often see Brown wandering in to them at the crack of dawn.

"He is a very early riser and he goes to bed quite early, which is not good for the body politic, which mostly consists of people who go to bed late and are not early risers."

Under Blair its consdiered that the Civil Service was politicised, under Brown it now seems the Civil Service is simply ignored. One policy advisor told the Times that,

"Government by sofa has been replaced by government by mobile phone. When Brown wants something, he goes direct. It’s sometimes awkward because it means he by-passes the Whitehall machine and we don’t know what is happening."

Another suggested people are actually starting to ignore their mobiles when he rings,

"We’ve got to the point where people deliberately avoid taking a call because he phones up so frequently. If you float an idea, he will ask you to write a policy paper on it and he’ll keep phoning you until you’ve written it. It’s absolutely nonstop."

Wild speculation, but, based on some of the things said in the article, I bet the phrase "he's doin' my 'ead in" gets said every now again. It is telling though that Brown, whilst being different from Blair in style, appears to still have much of the same trait in that policy flows beside rather through the machinery of Government. The fact they're ignoring his calls already did make me chuckle though. I wonder if they have special ringtones just for him?