When Steve Hilton headed to California after just two years at Downing Street, he said he was demoralised by the “red tape and bureaucracy” of the Civil Service machine. This week, his comments on the inner workings of government to students at Stanford have turned media attention to the related battles behind Ministry doors – and no doubt done wonders for the brand-new series of Yes, Prime Minister. But is the ideal of an apolitical civil service really as broken as he would have us believe?

It’s true that some civil servants are less politically neutral than others, but the conflict between civil servants and their political masters hinges more on incentives than ideology. The two groups have quite different personal interests, which pull the government juggernaut in separate directions.

First, politicians have pretty short shelf lives, so speed is of paramount importance. A government at the start of a five-year term needs change to happen quickly if it’s to win another mandate – or at least make a tangible difference before it gets kicked out. Civil servants, on the other hand, are in it for the long haul. With careers of 30 years or more, they take a longer-term perspective on the problems of the day. While politicians want revolution, the senior civil service is more inclined towards an orderly evolution. If they could make omelettes without breaking eggs, they would.

Second, popularity is essential to any politician, so the impact of policy decisions on polling numbers is at the forefront of their minds. By contrast, while civil servants require the actions of the government to be broadly acceptable, they resist linking decisions to sometimes fickle public opinion. That said, there are times when public opinion itself is at the heart of the unviability of a particular policy. The Poll Tax is one example where a policy was sufficiently unacceptable that it led to civil unrest, and the Civil Service advised strongly against it on that basis.

But while they move at different speeds and have different motivations, the two groups have similar mindsets in the one area that forms the battleground for their most serious fallings out; the need to avoid failure. The 2011 spat between Theresa May and Brodie Clark over border controls was typical of a culture where broad shoulders taking the burden of blame are rarely rewarded. The problem is exacerbated by ambiguity over who should take the blame for what. The reputation of Iain Duncan Smith will be shredded if the IT system for Universal Credit goes into meltdown later this year – but then, he’s not building the database himself. And while political operators can blame the “pasty tax” and the “caravan tax” from last year’s budget on civil service ineptitude, the hottest of political hot potatoes, namely taxation policy, needs close political attention. It’s no use blaming junior policy officials in the Treasury.

If the rules of the blame game could be more clearly agreed, the other differences might be seen in a better light – as strengths of the system rather than weaknesses. A government machine that acts now and repents at leisure at the whim of public opinion is just as bad as one that never acts at all. Good decision making requires a range of different perspectives to be considered. For each of Steve Hilton’s great policy ideas obstructed, there might well be another poll tax that never saw the light of day.