When you introduce an overhaul, just about everyone will tell you they would have done it differently or not at all.
The Tory leader, David Cameron, took great joy in reminding Tony Blair at prime minister's questions today that his own former Labour home secretary thought this bit of Whitehall shakeup was a mad idea.
Under the outgoing home secretary, John Reid, the department is spinning off a new Ministry of Justice, which will absorb the Department for Constitutional Affairs and take lead responsibility for criminal justice legislation.
Meanwhile, a new Office for Security and Counter-terrorism will become the "strategic centre" in government to coordinate the counter-terrorist "battle of values and ideas" across government.
It could have been worse, according to the Guardian which today revealed that Tony Blair had also entertained the idea of splitting the Treasury in two after the last general election.
But the proposal to replace the amorphous Treasury machine with a ministry of finance and a department of economic and industrial policy, drawn up in detail in a 200-page document, was shelved after advisers warned the prime minister that trying to break up Gordon Brown's fiefdom would force internal tensions between the two top men into the public eye.
So will Gordon Brown stop the tinkering once he is in office? Or is an overhaul of successive departments now on the cards by an incoming prime minister keen to signal that Whitehall is now his manor to play with.
