Whitehall farce

Yet another Home Secretary appears to be about to bite the political dust. The hapless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is but the latest incumbent to discover the truth of her department’s reputation as a political graveyard as we digest the way in which she tried to conceal the fact that more than 9,000 illegal immigrants have been cleared to work in the private security industry, some of them guarding sensitive Whitehall locations and some even under Metropolitan Police contracts.

What this reveals more clearly than ever before is the fathomless depths of incompetence to which British public administration has now descended. The fact that this has now jeopardised national security should surprise no-one. A country which has lost control of its own borders, whose immigration and asylum processes have been known for years to be a shambles about which nothing has been done, is a country whose government has simply lost control, period. Immigration and security are but the sharpest end of this. There is scarcely a department of state or public service which does not present a spectacle of serial incompetence.

There are various interlocked reasons for this, of which I would suggest the most significant are the politicisation of the British civil service and the resulting collapse of its integrity and efficacy, which were seamlessly linked; the undermining of our entire political, administrative and intellectual class by the depredations of moral and cultural relativism; and the ultimate cause of all of this, the loss of Britain’s belief and confidence in itself as a nation.