We say we want politicians kept out of the picture, but we blame them when state agencies mess up

Let’s recap. Clandestine migrants from France are able to enter the country without fear of deportation, but tourists making the same journey are subjected to two weeks of house arrest. Play by the rules, fill out the forms correctly and give your real name, and the system will pursue you. Break into the country illicitly and you’ll eventually be given leave to remain.

Is this deliberate policy? Of course not. Every home secretary, Labour and Conservative, has sought to toughen our border controls. The trouble is that all bureaucracies, left to themselves, prefer easy tasks to hard ones.

And our bureaucracies generally are left to themselves, because that is what we, the voters, kept demanding. “Stop treating everything as a political football!” we said. “Let the professionals get on!”

Well, we’ve got what we claimed to want, namely an administrative machine beyond the reach of our elected representatives. Our exams are run by Ofqual (“Keep the politicians out of the picture”). Our healthcare system is removed from political oversight (“Hands off our NHS”). Our epidemic preparedness is left to Public Health England (“Listen to the experts”).

How, then, did we react when these public bodies messed things up? Did we pursue Ofqual, with its armies of directors, strategists and press officers, over the failure of its exam algorithms? Did we complain about the NHS’s calamitous decision to send unscreened patients into care homes in readiness for a tidal wave that never came? Did we demand to know why, as late as March, PHE was still mainly fretting about unhealthy meals?

Of course not. With a neat mental sidestep, we suddenly called these agencies “the Government” and directed our rage at the politicians – the same politicians whom we wanted to be kept out of the picture.

Commentators and politicians have been abuzz all week about an excoriating article in the US magazine, The Atlantic, setting out why Britain fared so badly compared to other countries. It says: “Expert advisory committees proved too slow and ponderous, with not enough dissenting voices; crisis-response cells could not cope and had to be bypassed; the Cabinet Office buckled under the strain; the NHS had no adequate way of sharing data; authorities could not meet the sudden need for mass testing; the Foreign Office could not get people home fast enough; the Department of Health could not design a contact-tracing app that worked; the Government overall could not sufficiently procure key pandemic equipment.”

All true. Yet every item on that list is, if you think about it, an indictment of our standing bureaucracies. Before the coronavirus arrived, the desire to overhaul the government machine struck most people as slightly wonkish. Now we can see that it is an urgent national priority.

Naturally, those who share the prejudices of our quangocracy – a fondness for high public spending, Europhilia, an obsession with identity politics, even to the exclusion of whatever is supposed to be their primary task – don’t see the problem. But almost every minister who has struggled through the past six months now grasps what has gone wrong. An

imperium in imperio has grown up, self-appointed and self-sustaining, that pursues its own priorities even when they flatly contradict the Cabinet’s stated objectives, but that then proves useless when called on to discharge its notional functions.

The solution is to ensure that people on the government payroll work for the rest of us, rather than for themselves. In some cases, this will mean scrapping a quango altogether, as with PHE and (one hopes) the

We’ve long said: “stop treating everything as a political football!” Well, this is the result: a quangocracy.

deeply partisan Electoral Commission, without which we managed perfectly well in the pre-Blair era. In areas where MPs need to delegate authority, it should be done narrowly and contingently. Public bodies should be required to plead before the relevant parliamentary committee every year for their budgets and, indeed, their continuing existence.

Where possible, the functions of quangos should pass not to MPs but to local authorities. Town halls are not nearly so prone as Whitehall to waste gargantuan sums on consultants and software cock-ups. Let county and metropolitan authorities raise the bulk of their own revenue. Let them reassume primary responsibility for the relief of poverty. Let them – or perhaps the elected police commissioners – set local sentencing guidelines. Give residents a direct say through local referendums.

These changes are too extensive to be made piecemeal. There is an overwhelming case, as we leave the EU, for recalibrating our constitutional arrangements. As powers come back from Brussels, we need to decide which of them to pass directly to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast – and, indeed, to local councils. We should negotiate a high degree of fiscal autonomy for the devolved assemblies – and for English counties and cities. Taken together, these reforms are enough to warrant, if not a full-scale constitutional convention, at least a Royal Commission.

Those who are happy with the soft-Left setting of the administrative state will doubtless protest that all this is a massive distraction from the epidemic and the consequent recession. But the past six months have made the opposite point. The coronavirus squall showed that our ship of state was in a lamentable condition, leaky and dilapidated. Now an altogether rougher tempest looms: our debt has risen to above two trillion pounds and we are in the sharpest economic contraction in our history. We cannot hope to navigate the coming storm unless we first caulk our hull and clear our rigging. The sea water is already flooding in. We have no more time to waste.