The secret shame of fast streamers was revealed yesterday during an extremely insightful Q & A session entitled: 'Does class matter in the modern civil service?' (Verdict: It does, but not as much as it used to).

One fast streamer in the audience (I think she said she was from the Home Office) made the shocking revelation that she had kept her fast stream status hidden from her team because she was so ashamed - and the head of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), David Bell, confirmed that the fast stream "was not universally liked within departments".

Audience members were similarly candid. One questioner suggested that the fast stream just created a new class system within the civil service; another had given up on applying  to it after his first rejection convinced him that his interviewers had retired to "a smoke filled room" and come to the conclusion that his face didn't fit.

It sounds like there is a lot of bad feeling in the corridors of Whitehall. Who would have thought it? I now have images of civil servants (non-fast stream) giving other civil servants (fast streamers) cut eye in the canteen, imparting catty comments in the toilets. It sounds like schools again.

Admittedly, it must be pretty galling to have some hot shot graduate parachuted into your office to monopolise all the most juicy projects. But defence perm sec Bill Jeffrey's argument that the civil service has to compete with the big private sector employer graduate schemes is persuasive. He described himself as "unashamedly elitist" in this matter.

That makes him sound like a true Whitehall dinosaur who wants to keep the civil service looking as it did in 1963 but, despite leading the notoriously old school Ministry of Defence (women's lib is a mystery to their IT staff: female staff still appear as Mrs, Miss or Ms in their email addresses), he is very much a modern man. In fact, he has quietly but passionately fought for the rights of everyone who isn't male and white for the past few years that he has been the civil service's 'diversity champion'.

(As an aside: it is faintly amusing that the two most senior officials responsible for equality and diversity - Jeffrey and Government Equalities Office boss Jonathan Rees - are both white men. It shouldn't, and doesn't, really matter of course as long as they get the job done, and a deliberate decision to choose someone female or non-white would have been a sad bit of tokenism).

Jeffrey is no fool when it comes to diversity. He was, for example, extremely open to one questioner's suggestion that schemes such as the fast stream or the summer internship scheme might pull in BME (black and minority ethnic) candidates but was at risk of simply "ticking boxes". No, this wasn't an anti-equality rant: she was concerned that the candidates she was line managing were as upper-middle class, as privately and Oxbridgely educated as the dreaded white, middle class males who currently (but less and less so) dominate the senior civil service. "If we're not careful on the conventional diversity agenda, we can just end up ticking boxes," he said. Anyone who thought Suma Chakrabarti's appointment appointment as the first non-white perm sec meant the work had been done, they were kidding themselves, said Jeffrey: Suma would be the first to point out that he had as privileged a background as the next SCS-er, Jeffrey revealed.

So, we might be getting a more feminine and a more ethnically diverse civil service, but it will probably remain a fairly middle class civil service. This is an inevitability of parental expectation and education I suppose.

Even those with a working class background who do make it into the civil service, one such audience member argued, could end up feeling that they had to repress their working class accent, speech and mannerisms in order to conform to the behaviour of the majority. (He was pretty sure calling his bosses 'mate' wasn't going to go down well).

But with members of the panel arguing that only a truly diverse civil service would be able to serve a diverse society, isn't it going to be necessary for everyone to be welcomed with open arms if the real diversity box is going to be ticked? Welcomed whatever the colour of their skin, the shape of their anatomy or whether they drop their Tees and Aitches.

* Read more about this session at www.civilservicenetwork.com/news