A bold move

Truly our Deputy Prime Minister is the gift that keeps on giving.

Not content with ensuring she has an official photographer - on a £68k salary - following around to document her doings, she has, it appears, now found a novel use for all those civil servants assigned to help with her workload in Westminster.

As Guido Fawkes tells it, doubtless fed up with them cluttering up her office, last month our Ange bussed them all round to her London flat and set them to work packing boxes, shifting furniture and emptying the fridge ahead of her move to rather more luxurious quarters in Admiralty House. 

As a modus operandi, it’s interestingly reminiscent of the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith who, when her dining room needed redecorating, popped over to her local prison and grabbed a couple of inmates on the community-service programme to do the job in exchange for a nominal donation to charity and some plants.

At the time, I suggested this was the result of the same conflation of the professional and the personal - ‘l’état, c’est moi!’ - which has led politicians of all persuasions to claim a spectacular variety of goodies (not to mention mortgage payments and, pertinently at the moment, heating bills) on expenses in the belief that they are somehow entitled to them by virtue of their position.

As was the case over her unconventional living arrangements (enjoying domestic bliss with her brother in her former council house while her husband lived with the kids and all their belongings a mile down the road, at least as far as the Inland Revenue was concerned) and her use of headed House of Commons paper to write a distinctly menacing complaint to a shoe shop, Rayner would doubtless see no problem with using government employees as removal men and women -  after all, as she might see it, they are civil servants.

And it certainly puts a whole new slant on the idea of them ‘working from home’.