The elite’s favourite firm has gone Hello Boys bust

DAVID Lidington’s ears went traffic-light red as he defended the Government – Governments since the New Labour era – over the Carillion affair. One of Whitehall’s favourite privatesector contactors had just gone bust. Spectacularly bust. Wonderbra Eva Herzigova hello-boys bust.

Our elite, from Mandelsonians to May-ites and all those Blairite/ Osbornish Centrists with their networky non-executive directorships, was in an awkward spot.

It fell to Mr Lidington, Theresa May’s new Damian Green in at least some respects, to spread calm and reassurance. ‘Regrettable,’ he called it. ‘Disappointing.’ To appreciate the understatement here, imagine the owner of a space rocket seeing the thing do a loop-the-loop seconds after lift-off before it nosedives into the ocean with a terminal ‘splosh’, and responding with an ‘oh, I say, that’s a bit of a bore’.

Or shades of the poor Earl of Uxbridge at the Battle of Waterloo, observing that he had just had his leg shot orf, only for the Duke of Wellington to look down at the smouldering stump and murmur ‘so you have – what bad luck’. There are times for nonchalance and there are times for declamatory fury. Mr Lidington went for the Wellington option. He claimed that legal propriety prevented him condemning top executives’ bonuses at Carillion. Such matters might be the subject of an inquiry by the Official Receiver. It would therefore be improper of him to comment beyond saying he could ‘understand’ if many people thought such bonuses appalling.

ON a day when the postThatcher settlement – the use of private contractors to deliver state-paid services – looked in dreadful disarray, one might have expected the Corbynites to be on more of a roll. Oddly, this did not happen. Labour’s spokesman, Jon Trickett, worked a few anti-Tory digs into his short speech but it was not the CorboLeninist, anti- capitalist eruption some of us had anticipated, even though Comrade Jeremy himself was in the Chamber to hear it.

Mr Trickett said the Government had been ‘recklessly complacent’ about Carillion’s financial affairs and should have run a mile once it heard the company declare profit warnings in the summer. Well, maybe. But that might have triggered Carillion’s collapse a lot earlier, argued Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood in a select committee an hour earlier. Mr Trickett’s best moment came when he noted that the chairman of Carillion had been the Government’s ‘corporate responsibility tsar’. Ha! That says everything you need to know about Whitehall tsars. His wider complaint against private finance initiatives (PFIs) was easily defused by Mr Lidington, who noted that Mr Trickett had been an enthusiastic member of Gordon Brown’s team at 10 Downing Street, and he seemed perfectly happy about PFIs then.

Despite such an unpromising wicket, Mr Lidington made some headway with his argument that the private sector would have to clear up the mess. He rejected a claim by Stephen Kinnock (Lab, Aberavon – trying to work himself into the Corbynites’ good books) that we had seen ‘the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of risk’. To the contrary, said Mr Lidington, private enterprise was going to pick up most of the risk. In the select committee earlier, the head of the civil service, John Manzoni (formerly of BP), said the shareholders of and lenders to Carillion had been ‘wiped out to the tune of billions of pounds’.

Carillion’s HQ’s local MP was Eleanor Smith (Lab, Wolverhampton SW). I’m afraid she was hamfisted – to the extent that Speaker Bercow smirked. What a pity for those Carillion workers that the Wolverhampton SW seat is no longer occupied by Labour’s sharp and eloquent Rob Marris, who quit at the last election.

Andrew Bridgen (Con, NW Leics) said that ‘capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell – there is nothing to keep us on the straight and narrow’. Mr Bridgen added: ‘ Carillion’s finished but demand for its services continues and those jobs will be recreated and in future the management will have to be better.’

Mr Lidington paid tribute to Mr Bridgen’s theological expertise.