It’s time to drain the swamp...

JACOB REES-MOGG is already facing an uphill task to get civil servants back to their desks without Conservative colleagues playing silly beggars. What possessed Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries to call his return-towork drive ‘Dickensian’?

The Moggster isn’t sending children with rickets up chimneys. He’s merely asking feather-bedded public employees to do the job they are paid for, at the place where they are contracted to do it. Resistance from the unions is only to be expected — but not from fellow Conservatives.

White-collar civil servants have never had it so good, sitting at home munching Hobnobs for the past two years while still getting their full London weighting allowance.

Whoever said that lockdown consisted of middle-class people hiding while workingclass people brought them things was bang on.

I was reminded of this last week when we had a drainage emergency, to put it as tastefully as possible.

After couldn’t-care-less Thames Water took a cursory glance and washed their hands of responsibility, I called our domestic insurers HomeServe, who sent engineer Steve Atkinson.

He spent hours up to his neck in it, tracing the root cause and eventually clearing the blockage, which was under a neighbouring property. Despite modern technology, poking around in blocked drains is about as ‘Dickensian’ as it gets.

While entitled civil servants have been lounging around at home, dedicated manual workers including delivery drivers, telecoms technicians, supermarket staff, dustmen, drainage engineers, etc, were on the front line every day.

What if they’d decided to cower at home with their feet up for the duration?

Without people like Steve, not just me last week but all of us would have been up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Workshy civil servants should remember that and get back to their desks sharpish, or be given their P45s.

If they don’t like their cushy life in the Whitehall swamp, they could always get a new job clearing drains.