Over the weekend I had some interesting responses to my rather flippant tweet asking if there was a government minister not under pressure at the moment. The consensus seemed to be that William Hague was still looking pretty good, with Michael Gove a close second. No one mentioned Eric Pickles, but it was interesting to see the substantial figure of the Communities Secretary sitting at the Prime Minister’s side during his appearance in parliament yesterday. It would probably be too chippy, even for me, to point to the class origins of the government’s best performers. But the posh boys are certainly not at peak performance at the moment.
One by one, members of the Cabinet have walked into disasters of their own making, usually through a mixture of hubris and right-wing idealism. The one lesson the Cameroons didn’t learn from the Blair era was management of expectation.
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