Expert Advice

It is of course axiomatic to mainstream, centrist, sensible politics that most people don't know what is good for them. No modern minister would ever listen to teachers on education, medical professionals on health, or lawyers on legal aid, because vested interests, professional myopia and sheer brute blobbery will always cloud their thinking, so that their answers will usually imply that more money ought to be taken from rich tax-dodgers and spent on education, health and justice instead. You might just as well ask the poor for an objective opinion on what will cure their poverty.

Fortunately for our Britishness, a few professions, such as bankers, politicians and the scumbag press, are immune to this pernicious self-interest and can be relied upon to regulate themselves. Another member of this moral élite is the spying trade, which has recently been robustly defended in the press by Lord Carlile. A few malcontents are raising concerns about the snooper's charter; Lord Carlile has never seen a politician do anything against the public's privacy, and does not seem to believe a politician ever will. Lord Carlile knows this because he is co-owner of a private security firm which offers "strategic advice on UK policy and regulation" and likes to buy the cabinet secretary breakfast now and then. As if that were not enough, Lord Carlile's business partner is a former head of MI6; so Lord Carlile's character as an objective and disinterested commentator should be self-evident, even if we did not have Lord Carlile's own word for it as a spook, a politician and a Liberal Democrat.