Running scared

Last year, James Brokenshire, the Secretary of State for Housing, appointed Sir Roger Scruton as a Government housing tsar, describing him as “a global authority on aesthetics” who had taken great personal risks “to champion freedom of speech and freedom of expression”. This week, Mr Brokenshire sacked Sir Roger for something he said.

Sir Roger went “off message” in an interview with the New Statesman – he insists the magazine unfairly represented his views – which is exactly what one would imagine a philosopher would do. Isn’t that the point of them, to think the unthinkable? The Government must have known the professor’s views before it appointed him – he has written enough books – and thus ought to stand by its man. It says much about the Conservative Party’s crisis of identity that it won’t do the decent thing.

This happened before with Toby Young, a journalist and education campaigner appointed to the board of a new university regulator, only to be hit with a barrage of highly personal criticism that forced him to resign. The Tories want to hire radicals who can shake things up, which is desperately needed, but they don’t have the bottle to defend them when they are criticised for the very things that make them mavericks.

One likely consequence of the Scruton and Young stories is that any non-politician offered a government role will think twice because it isn’t worth the reputational damage, and politics will thus become ever more the preserve of a tiny band of political professionals with identikit views completely out of touch with popular opinion or concrete reality.