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 inflated mortgage payments and, pertinently at the moment, sky-high heating bills) on expenses in the belief that they are somehow entitled to live it up in style at public expense by virtue of their position.
Rayner’s response to the public anger when details emerged of the donor-funded designer clothing, holidays and tickets merrily hoovered up by Labour’s front bench was to suggest that the outrage she faced was because she had been ‘over-transparent’; like a stroppy year 10 pupil caught smoking behind the bike-sheds, she seems to believe that the problem is not what she and the others did but the fact that she owned up after being found out.
As was the case over her unconventional living arrangements in Stockport (she and her brother in one former council, her husband and kids in another 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 have 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’.
So said apparatchiks had 4call better to fill their taxpayer-funded "working day" than to go moonlighting as removal operatives? P45s are go!
ReplyDeleteHear, hear!
DeleteWith the current calls for cutting government spending (while emphatically not saying anything about train drivers etc, etc, etc…), I’d say there’s a clear saving identified right there.
DeleteAK Haart’s post on the subject and the associated comments are well worth a visit:
https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2025/01/war-on-waste.html
There is a chilling aspect to this kind of behaviour too. As if they have been put there to distract us with their antics.
ReplyDeletePut there by people who manage the theatre, people who might say "you won't get anything useful done by this lot - and you may as well know it."