Why can’t the Government find more Conservatives to run public bodies?

Left-wing Twitter activists are determined to see a conspiracy in the appointment of Dido Harding to head the new National Institute for Health Protection. A Conservative peer, she is married to the Tory MP John Penrose, who sits on the advisory board of a small think tank called 1828. This think tank has apparently argued in the past for replacing the NHS with an insurance model; so, the logic goes, Baroness Harding’s new role is part of a sinister plot by the Government to parachute in Right-wing radicals to dismantle the welfare state and quietly launch a new free-market revolution.

Alas, the truth is rather more disappointing, and not solely because this is the most NHS-worshipping government in recent history. With a few honourable exceptions, ministers are continuing the trend of filling public appointments with people who are not in any way recognisably conservative.

The latest example is the man chosen by Grant Shapps to lead his new “acceleration unit”. The Transport Secretary has formed this unit in order to find ways of speeding up the “delivery” of infrastructure projects. It is plainly needed. The news came on the same day that it was announced that Crossrail is being postponed yet again, at a cost of a few more hundred million, and as all the while HS2 continues to break records for profligacy.

So why did Shapps consider

Grant Shapps’s latest appointment to run his acceleration unit is Darren Shirley. On his Twitter account, Mr Shirley lists his former affiliations as Which, WWF and Greenpeace

Darren Shirley to be the right person to run the unit? Shirley was previously head of the Campaign for Better Transport, a pressure group which has advocated against roadbuilding, called for the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to be brought forward, and which is fully signed up to the “sustainability” agenda, often a code word for policies that make private car ownership so intolerable as to force people to find other ways of getting around.

In a recent report, it supported the Government’s Covid “emergency” decision to allow local authorities to reduce road space without consulting residents. This, you might recall, is the policy responsible for turning scores of streets into dead-ends, undermining high streets just as they try to recover from lockdown, and provoking a popular revolt across the country against ill-thought-through measures that campaigners say are worsening both congestion and air pollution. On his Twitter account, Shirley describes himself as ex-Which, ex-WWF and ex-Greenpeace.

So why Shirley? I am not calling for some sort of modern-day Test Act, and it is a fallacy that appointing a Tory-supporting businessperson is an instant solution to the many problems caused by the quango state, as we are likely to discover with Baroness Harding. But given that we have elected a Conservative government, the least we are entitled to expect are appointees who support measures that accord with the interests of Conservative voters. In fact, Shirley’s appointment is all the more worrying because he appears to be in complete agreement with government policy, which has a tendency to embrace every eco-fantasy going.