Another week and another escape into the lives of real people by the Prime Minister. Westminster’s zoo keepers are really due a performance review. This time Oinky had not gone to market but to Hull, there to accuse the public sector of being “over-cautious”, “weak” and “intrusive”. Physician, heal thyself!
Today the PM was introduced by a woman with an unplaceable transatlantic accent who spoke almost entirely in managerial platitudes and acronyms. People were there, she said, “to power the self-care movement within our company”. Quite how being dragged out of your coffee break to watch a man who’d been poured into a blue shirt to talk about civil service reform is meant to boost “self-care” is anybody’s guess. It was more like they’d been dragged in to witness an act of self-abuse.
Sir Keir thanked the LinkedIn-personified woman and did his standard shirt sleeves-up, random hand-gestures opening. “This must be an incredibly exciting place to work!” he said. Well it was, until about two minutes ago.
After a long preamble about waiting lists and Ukraine, he finally got to the meat of the policy. His aim for the British state was something called “maximum power”. He made this sound like a particularly advanced form of dishwasher tablet technology. You could see the people in the row behind him thinking: “Cor, him off the Cillit Bang adverts has aged a bit!”
Clearly, unlike so many of these set-piece moments, it appeared that Sir Keir might actually be about to unveil something of genuine import. You could tell an announcement was imminent because the PM suddenly began inserting all sorts of caveats. “Of course,” he said, “I’m not questioning the dedication or the effort of individual civil servants.” (Thus spake a man who had never been on hold to the DVLA.) We can take comfort in the fact that when a politician says they’re not doing something you can be pretty certain that that is precisely what they are doing.
Finally we got to the big moment. NHS England was to be scrapped, the King of all Quangos slain in one fell swoop. Goodness knows I find the Prime Minister’s tone and manner deeply irritating. A sort of auricular scabies. And I think most of his policies – from his malevolent hatred of farmers to the Great Chagos Robbery – are borderline suicidal for the nation. However, if we can finally ignite the bonfire of the quangos, about which the Tories talked and talked but never acted for 14 years, then he will have done Britain a serious favour.
Perhaps while we’re on a roll, the PM may even find time to take his Muskian chainsaw to the £9.5 billion energy quango run by Ed Miliband, the Office for Value for Money, and others among the 27 arm’s-length bodies set up by… one Keir Rodney Starmer since last July. Still – there is more joy in heaven over a sinner that repenteth. Whether there’ll be joy in Whitehall is another matter entirely.
