The revolving trough

Listening to the radio sometimes does me ‘ed in. An item this evening on BBC Radio 4’s PM Programme covered what masqueraded as news the establishment of some new commission or other to examine how government works. One of the interviewees was a member of that commission, Baroness Sally Morgan. She was one of Tony Blair’s key advisors, so is clearly inimitably acquainted with the ins and outs of good government. Speaking in bland bureaucratese she explained what the problems were. Divining some sense out of what she said, one might assume ‘everything.’ The system is a proverbial tanker, hard to shift from its eternal course. What expertise the Baroness will bring to this probing study of government may be related to her directorships of failed private companies (check out Wikipedia) since she left the orbit of Downing Street. In her interview she called for, in effect a greater revolving door between the private sector and the civil service. These revolving doors are of course known to work very well, like in the defence and nuclear industries where basically government departments are ‘captured.’ I was upbraided once by a former chief whip for publicly criticising (in the Guardian, no less) the tendency of former Labour cabinet ministers et al to find their post-political fortunes in the private sector. Maybe that’s the kind of issue the new commission will look into? Ha! Only joking!