In The Times today, Danny Finkelstein defended the most hated profession in contemporary politics – the Special Advisers, or SpAds. Booo, hissss. The case against was (again) laid out by a number of former senior officials, with ex-Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull telling a Lords committee recently that he did not like SpAds rising to become Cabinet ministers by the time they were 38 “without touching the sides of real life”. Booo. Hisssss. Boooo.
But how many of the current Shadow Cabinet do you think have been SpAds in the past? Come on, what do you think? Half? A third? Out of the 28 members of the Shadow Cabinet, including David Cameron (who worked for Norman Lamont and Michael Howard) there are only four ex-SpAds. The others: Osborne, Clark and Willets. There are more lawyers and businesspeople in the Shadow Cabinet.
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