The Brightest and the Best

The Osborne economic miracle is alive and well in Whitehall, where any efficiency savings that were made from firing civil servants are being happily splurged on hiring the Government's chums in the private sector. Ministries are employing consultants at up to two thousand pounds a day; the most expensive seem to have been hired by the Department of Transport and Chris Graybeing's Ministry for Profitable Incarceration, and almost certainly the Ministry of Moron as well. A spokesbeing burbled that the consultants were needed because the ministries were "undertaking complex transformative projects" or, in Standard English, selling off public assets for private profit; and naturally one cannot expect mere minions of the State to know anything much about that. Doubtless this explains the absence from the list of the Department for Workfare and Privation, whose complex transformative project of replacing social security with Universal Credit, sanctions and food banks has been so smoothly managed by the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith.