Week 24: Focus on the Puppet Master

Written 29th August 2020

In my last blog, I focused on a rather forgettable minor player, ‘Dido’ Harding, who has been promoted despite manifest incompetence, overpaid and allowed to get away with  multiple shortcuts which would not normally be tolerated in a democratic society. Since writing that last blog (No.23) the number of permanent secretaries of the civil service got rid of has risen to six,  a manifestly hopeless Minister, Gavin Williamson, has not been found totally incompetent, but has been able to shift the blame onto not only his permanent secretary, but also the official in charge of the Educational system that was deemed (by our purely ceremonial Prime Minister) to be at fault. It is new that Ministers are not responsible for messes in their departments, and it is time that this blog focused on the source of our problems.

 

The Sabitsky affair: 

It is necessary to go back to the beginning of this year, to the appointment of a real ‘weirdo’ to assist Mr Cummings (DC in what follows). Andrew Sabisky was removed because even the normally compliant Cabinet refused to countenance a No 10 adviser who thought that black people were less intelligent than whites, had wanted to enforce contraception, to ensure that disadvantaged parents were not enabled to produce an ‘underclass’, and found his arguments similar to other eugenicists.  DC had not expressed such backward views himself, and on the contrary had argued that genetic testing to establish whether a fetus was likely to be highly intelligent should be paid for by the NHS, so that everyone could take advantage of it. The truth is, Sabitsky should never have been appointed, if civil servants had been allowed to do the background checks that a democratic society used to expect. But DC insisted on his appointment, and who could stop him?

 

The wished for weirdo (DC’s own blog)

In his blog, he states: “one of you will be a sort of personal assistant to me for a year. … you will not have weekday date nights, you will sacrifice many weekends – frankly it will be hard having a boy/girlfriend at all. I don’t want public school bluffers… I want people who can work in an extreme environment…. If you play office politics you will be discovered and immediately binned”.  As a psychiatrist, I find this a tad peculiar, the insistence that the new weirdo will have no erotic life, and will be constantly under threat from his/her new boss. Does one have to be a psychiatrist to find these stipulations peculiar? The demand for blind loyalty and unconditional commitment is not so much inspiring, as it is presumably intended, but creepily cultish and not in keeping with what one might reasonably expect from the cockpit of an advanced, rational democracy.

 

We should not be surprised by this, however.  DC is merely mirroring the demands of loyalty that his own boss has made the weak cornerstone of his Government.  Johnson has again and again stood by egregiously weak, incompetent or venal ministers and advisors, including Cummings himself, in preference to the kind of challenging, self-reflecting and free-thinking milieu that tend to make for sound governance.

 

What about the whole band of wished for advisers?

This sounds more like a substantial arm of government. Comprising data scientists, project managers, policy experts, deep experts on tv and digital, 

economists, communication experts, and of course, weirdos and misfits. (Where will they all sit?). Reading the whole blog, it comes across as very peculiar: there is no doubt that he is intelligent and well read, but it is not rigorously thought out. It reads more like a very bright adolescent, a rather immature person’s wish list, yet he is 48. It doesn’t hang together at all well.  They seem to embody the  essence of what he is suggesting – the precise policies will emerge from these unconventional people, as the DARPA team did in the US. The original arrangements aimed at transformational rather than incremental changes, and took in members from academia, industry and government agencies. Presumably they would allow for a slimmed down civil service. 

 

What other strategies are available to DC?

Persuading his enemies to resign – senior BBC staff are under pressure, others may be flattered with a peerage (Lord Frost now walks with a spring in his step, a thank you gift from DC for giving away absolutely nothing in his negotiations with M. Barnier. Of course, we can all see the strategy – eventually the EU will weaken, and we will gain all we want. We all await the last minute capitulation of the EU to our petty determination to keep all our toys in the pram, please. But it may not happen…Flattering Gavin Williamson with complete immunity for ministerial incompetence – he is ‘one of us’.  

 

Who can oppose Boris?

The pygmy Cabinet is the correct answer. But the cabinet has been

described as “the most inept government in living memory” (Fraser Nelson, Daily Telegraph) and “a cabinet of toadies” (The Week, 29th August). Little chance of that, then?. This is by no means the only example of our usual protections being no longer available. We are at present in an unbelievably bad position. DC dislikes the civil service, and the BBC. He is completely ruthless in getting his own way, and relegates the Prime Minister to mainly amusing roles – eg. driving through a set of plastic tiles on a tractor to advertise Brexit, blustering his way through Question Time in Parliament, where Keir Starmer now makes rings round him. Both the civil service and the BBC – thought by many citizens to be among the best things about our country, are both severely under threat. People can be appointed to senior, overpaid positions without an open procedure, and they can go on to let contracts that have not been openly advertised. It unfortunately suits our work-shy Prime Minister to go along with these horrors. 

Ministers no longer have responsibility for their own departments. One suspects that they must mainly please DC, rather than be aware of the wishes of Parliament. 

 

Conclusion

What hope do we have? Only that ‘spads’ come, and inevitably go when their chief has to move on. Remember the unpleasant Alan Waters (spad for Mrs T); Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy (spads for Mrs May), or of course Alastair Campbell, (an official to advise Mr Blair, him of the Dodgy Dossier?). It may be some time before the pygmy cabinet decide they have had enough of Boris: but when it happens we will come to understand that the pandemic has done something really good.

 

 

David Goldberg

29th August 2020. 

(Still very little hope of liberation from the oldies lockdown).