National pride and the passport fiasco

WITH the tone- deaf insensitivity of the quangocracy, HM Passport Office boss Mark Thomson declares he is ‘delighted’ that the contract for producing post-Brexit blue passports has gone to the FrancoDutch consortium, Gemalto.

Millions of Britons – including the 330,000 who signed a Mail petition presented to No 10 – will not share his satisfaction over this slap in the face to national pride.

Indeed, this paper profoundly regrets the decision by Britain’s De La Rue to admit defeat, withdrawing its challenge to an outcome that no other major country would dream of accepting.

But let there be no doubt where the true guilt lies. It rests with Whitehall officials who slavishly followed EU competition rules – sidestepped by nations such as France and Germany – and a Home Secretary who offered no leeway that might have helped De La Rue win the day.

As for Amber Rudd’s claim that Gemalto will save us £11million a year, leave aside how insignificant this looks beside the £40million a day we squander on foreign aid.

Forget, too, that this spurious ‘saving’ is meaningless beside the loss of British jobs and tax revenues that will result from sending the contract abroad.

Isn’t it profoundly depressing that we have a Home Secretary apparently so ignorant of what makes patriots tick?

The upshot is that those who looked forward to the return of the blue passport will now be fobbed off with a document printed abroad by a firm part-owned by the French government. And this is supposed to be cause for ‘delight’?