Theresa’s gang must get house in order

Half of new mums considered calling their babies Corbyn, a survey for Channelmum.com says. Must have been conducted when they were in labour. Tories hit by communication chaos

LAST Sunday I was sitting down to a hearty ribeye steak when the phone interrupted our lunch.

It was someone from the Government with a different kind of beef – a complaint that a story in that day’s paper did not reflect what Brexit Secretary David Davis told Andrew Marr that morning on his BBC show.

This was mightily irritating, and not just because lunch was getting cold. I had asked for the very information DD happily volunteered to Marr – yet for some reason I had been refused it just the day before.

Mislaid

The kindest take on this is that as Davis is the only Cabinet minister who can swagger sitting down he wanted to keep his swag under wraps until he was seated on the telly.

A less kind interpretation is that since Theresa May mislaid her majority the whole Whitehall shebang is bloody chaos.

There were hopes that when the PM got rid of those prize baboons Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill as her top aides No10 would stop acting as if it was the Kremlin under Leonid Brezhnev.

And government departments would no longer be treated like gulags dotted around the Siberia of Whitehall in which nothing was allowed out. A bit more glasnost so those employed as communicators can do a bit more, y’know, communicating.

Had Mrs May communicated with her predecessor David Cameron she might not find herself in the pickle she’s now in.

He was gobsmacked when she tried to take away pensioners’ homes to pay for their social care.

When the British own a home it’s their castle and politicians lay siege to it at their peril.

Not many people know this, but before the 2015 election Cameron considered a mansion tax on luxury houses and focus grouped a part of Lancashire where there aren’t any.

Voters hated it, even though they’d be unaffected.

They saw it as the thin end of the wedge under their own front doors.

Start with a tax on million pound properties and eventually, they reasoned, it will hit those worth £200,000. Cameron scrapped the idea.

I’m sure someone in Whitehall will want to complain I’ve revealed this. I’ll plan for a late lunch.