Whitehall: Seventh top civil servant out after Dominic Cummings’ ‘hard rain’ threat

A senior civil servant has become the seventh head of a Whitehall department to stand down since Boris Johnson’s re-election.

The departure of Rowena Collins Rice as director general of the Attorney General’s Office was announced just hours after the dramatic resignation of the head of the Government Legal Department Sir Jonathan Jones in a row over the prime minister’s plans to override elements of the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

It is understood that Ms Collins Rice is set to move to another senior public sector job - to be announced on Friday - and her departure has been planned for some time.

But it will add to the sense of turmoil in Whitehall following the resignations of the head of the civil service and permanent secretaries at the Home Office, Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice and Department for Education in recent months.

Mr Johnson’s top adviser Dominic Cummings is known to be set on a shake-up of the government’s engine-room to centralise more power in the PM’s hands, and recently warned civil servants that a “hard rain” was coming.