At last some political unity as we pay respects to the brilliant Jeremy Heywood

Politics is broken. Westminster is divided. Our leaders are incapable of coming together. All these things may well be true, but for a few hours today at least the normal rules didn’t apply.

If you’d been standing outside Westminster Abbey this lunchtime, you’d have seen the current (Tory) Prime Minister mingling with three former PMs (one Tory, two Labour) and one deputy PM (Lib Dem) — as well as dozens of other politicians, special advisers and government figures from across the ideological spectrum.

If a national crisis such as the financial crash or Brexit couldn’t unite our political parties, what on earth was going on today that was so significant?

The answer: a memorial service for a government official. His name was Jeremy Heywood — and until he was forced to retire due to ill health last October (he died two weeks later), he was Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, having served multiple prime ministers over many years.

To understand why so many politicians were prepared to set aside their differences to celebrate the life of a public servant, you need to know three things. First, Jeremy was brilliant. I was lucky enough to work with him in Downing Street, and he was one of the most creative, inspired and committed people I’ve ever come across.

On every front, Jeremy was indispensable. Never for a second did he do anything other than try his utmost to deliver on behalf of the prime minister of the day — and no one could be more effective at getting the machinery of government moving in the right direction.

That wasn’t just thanks to Jeremy’s intelligence — it was also on account of his unbelievable work rate.

On my first day in No 10, Jeremy suggested that I copy him in on my emails, and he’d always try to help with whatever I was working on. I decided to call his bluff, and started to do that — thinking he’d quickly ask me to stop, or more likely, never look at anything I sent.

To my surprise, he read every message, every memo, every draft paper — and always, always had ideas for making sure policy proposals got implemented in the right way.

And of course, all those prime ministers were at Westminster Abbey today because Jeremy did the same thing for them — and much more besides.

It’s hard to overstate how vital this is when you’re in government. Whitehall — and the public sector more generally — is a massive and unwieldy beast, and driving change through the system can be so difficult. Jeremy always knew how to maximise the chances of success — which is why he proved indispensable to one government after another.

If the former Cabinet Secretary’s prodigious nous was one reason so many politicians came together to remember him, the second was his unshakeable belief that government should be modernised to make it more capable and more effective.

When David Cameron got into office in 2010, we had ambitious plans on a whole range of areas, such as decentralising power to mayors and local authorities and making much better use of technology to improve public services.

I expected Jeremy to be wary of many of these proposals — but he turned out to be even more zealous about reforming government than any of us. This isn’t a question of politics — it was about overhauling Whitehall so that it could best deliver on behalf of the country.

During the 2015 general election campaign, while politicians were out knocking on doors in marginal constituencies, Jeremy invited me to speak at a seminar he’d organised at No 10 with a couple of hundred high-flying civil servants.

I said a few words at the start, and then sat down to listen to presentations by officials on how they’d implemented new approaches such as behavioural economics, design thinking and open data into their policy-making.

These were all initiatives I’d got going when I worked in Downing Street — but Jeremy had continued to run with them after I’d left, because he was so committed to new ideas and new ways of improving the way Whitehall works. But the third reason Britain’s politicians came together today is perhaps the most important. At a time when the civil service has been attacked in the media for being “wreckers” — and somehow deliberately thwarting Brexit — it’s worth noting that no one who has ever served in government would ever accuse public servants of doing anything like that.

Jeremy, like every civil servant I ever came across, took incredibly seriously his responsibility to deliver for the democratically elected government of the day, irrespective of his personal views. This isn’t easy to do. It’s impossible not to have some political leanings of some kind of other — civil servants are only human, after all.

But if you’re determined enough, you can set aside those opinions and focus on implementing policies for whatever minister you happen to be serving.

Jeremy did that impeccably — for politicians as fundamentally different in mindset and outlook as, say, Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown.

This steadfast impartiality is worth honouring — especially in the face of all the cynical scapegoating over Brexit that we’ve seen recently. In a sense, that’s what everyone gathered at Westminster Abbey was doing today.

Jeremy was incredibly special and irreplaceable — but he was also wonderfully ordinary: one government official among many, all dedicated to public service in the best possible way.

So while Jeremy is dearly missed, his legacy lives on — in the quiet, committed work by thousands of civil servants every day. If that’s not worth celebrating, then I don’t know what is.