Public employees are probably bemused by the rows at the heart of Whitehall. Local authority chief executives have long had to put up with aggressive politicians. So David Cameron's adviser Steve Hilton is contemptuous? Police officers, council staff and quango personnel knew a while ago that the Cameron government isn't exactly enamoured of public service.
Lower down the food chain, they might observe that senior civil servants are still handsomely paid, and are usually more than happy to carry out ministers' most destructive commands. Do they really deserve pity when ministers start making disparaging remarks?
Besides, the Whitehall picture isn't as lurid as some have painted it. In most departments the conventions hold. Ministers and senior civil servants are mutually respectful. In the Treasury, permanent secretary Sir Nick Macpherson has no difficulties working with the chancellor, George Osborne; nor Martin Donnelly with the business secretary, Vince Cable; and – at least until his elevation to head of the civil service – Sir Bob Kerslake had no problems carrying out the commands of communities secretary Eric Pickles.
Ian Watmore is departing the Cabinet Office in haste, but he has sincere personal reasons. It may also be that structurally his position had become peculiar, after Cameron decided to split the leading civil service role occupied by Gus O'Donnell. Between the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, it is not clear where Watmore fits.
But the real problems with the civil service aren't to do with the odd duumvirate of Jeremy Heywood as civil servant closest to Cameron and Kerslake as titular head of the civil service. They aren't even to do with boorish special advisers or loose remarks by the prime minister about "enemies of enterprise" – Blair also used disparaging language.
What is wrong is structural. Last December O'Donnell rounded up his permanent secretary colleagues and fired off a coarsely worded warning to the chair of the Commons public accounts committee saying "back off" – we don't want MPs quizzing us. We are ministers' men and women, he wrote, not answerable to parliament, except through the strict conventions of accounting officers.
That showed how O'Donnell, and the mandarinate at large, are unwilling to think about changing circumstances, evolving forms of accountability, especially the hoary doctrine that ministers are formally responsible for everything that goes on in Whitehall.
To put the point more strongly: mandarins aren't much willing to think. They proffer advice, but rarely engage with wider issues in the way, say, local authority chief executives do in their often anguished semi-public confabs or, more guardedly, top health managers or senior police and military officers.
Perhaps the senior civil service finds such thinking difficult because now the item at the top of the agenda will be whether we need civil servants, most of whom work locally rather than in the centre.
In the past, Whitehall crises have prompted the top civil servant to deliver a considered if coded speech, mulling over questions of collective identity and, where necessary, calling the politicians to order. If you don't hear from Heywood or Kerslake over the next weeks, it may be that the mandarins have nothing to say. That may mean they think everything is fine, despite Hilton, or, more likely, that the senior civil service has nothing to say.
• David Walker is a contributing editor to the Guardian's Public Leaders Network