No, Minister

In Britain, new cabinet ministers quickly learn that civil servants aren't always working towards the same goals.

Click here for all of David Frum’s blogposts from the 2010 Conservative Party conference.

Best line of the party conference:

At the News International cocktail party, I was talking to a new Conservative cabinet minister. He described to me his experience with his civil servants.

"Now I know what it's like to be a wife. You ask over and over and over again for the same thing to happen, you are promised it will happen, and then it doesn't. You experiment with different ways to ask, to see if one works better than another. And then you are made to feel that there is something wrong with YOU for asking so often: you are becoming a nag."