‘Are you part of the deep state, Prime Minister?’ And for once Rishi’s answer was quite witty...
RISHI Sunak, up in front of the prolix goatsuckers of the liaison committee, was asked ‘is there such a thing as the deep state and are you part of it?’ The Prime Minister pulled a sideways face and replied: ‘I probably wouldn’t tell you if I was.’ Quite witty.
William Wragg (Con, Hazel Grove) had asked the question hoping to make Liz Truss look silly. Ms Truss recently claimed that her brief premiership was killed off by the ‘deep state’.
The phrase may evoke images of a covert fellowship whose members give each other funny handshakes and convene on benches in St James’s Park while hiding behind broadsheet newspapers.
The trouble with this ‘deep state’ idea is not that establishment boobies don’t collude to further their dubious ends.
It is the suggestion that they are remotely subtle or secretive about it. In fact, as we saw yesterday from this latest smug, boring, predictable outing of the liaison committee, they are pretty naked about their behaviour. They believe in high public spending.
They think civil servants are wonderful. They love immigration and human-rights litigation – lawyers generally, in fact – and they are hot, hot, hot for Net Zero. Any dissent gets them prickling with indignation.
Westminster is full of these people and if Keir Starmer becomes prime minister we will have even more of them. Sir Keir’s chief of staff is a former Whitehall mandarin.
The liaison committee, composed of select committee bosses, is not short on self-admiration. It reeks of failure rather in the way old men’s trousers emit a whiff of urine. You look around the big U-shaped table and most of them are dwindling trundlers, frontbench rejects or members of the soon-to- quit brigade. Mr Wragg, 36 going on 63, is one of them. He is not standing at the general election. Nor are his liaison committee colleagues Steve Brine and Philip Dunne.
Another liaison man, Clive Betts, has been running the same select committee (on local government – sexy Rexy) for the past 14 years.
Harriett Baldwin, Jeremy Quin, Liam Byrne, Dame Diana Johnson and that waistcoated natterjack Sir Bob Neill were once ministers. Bernard Jenkin was never even that.
Thirty-two years an MP, poor Bernard ‘did not bat’ in ministerial terms. That does not stop him chairing the liaison committee as though he is a tremendous authority on statesmanship. Sir Bernard is keen on ‘deep strategic thinking’. It has become his thing.
He even persuaded the liaison committee to start a strategy subcommittee (his colleagues presumably agreed to it on the grounds of ‘anything to shut him up’). That sub-committee’s evidence sessions were pulverisingly dull, a succession of Whitehall stooges calling for more attention and money to be spent on them and their ilk.
Sir Bernard yesterday invited Mr Sunak to support the idea of a school of government, a physical campus where senior civil servants and ministers and MPs can be trained to think correctly and, in Sir Bernard’s words, ‘understand the same language’. Er, what’s wrong with English? ‘Understand the same language’! Maybe Ms Truss was not so wrong, after all.
SIR Bernard was so excited about this idea of a Continental-style school of government, he encouraged Mr Sunak to include it in the next Conservative manifesto. The Prime Minister let Sir Bernard down more politely than he deserved.
As you may know, a manifesto is a document which a political party publishes before an election, laying down its proposals in the hope of attracting public support. Manifestos are supposedly a way of attracting votes, not repelling them.
Sir Bernard, the handsome nincompoop who collaborated with Harriet Harman to rid the Conservatives of that great election winner Boris Johnson, thinks a school of government for the Blob is the way to beat Labour.
If such a school does ever open, perhaps one of its modules can examine the parliamentary displacement activity of fading matinee-idol MPs who have completely lost their grip on reality.