There is a simple lesson the government needs to learn from Alan Milburn’s resignation as social mobility czar: employ a GOAT at your peril. A ‘GOAT’ – the acronym derives from Gordon Brown’s phrase ‘Government Of All Talents – is a figure appointed to a government job, either as a minister or an adviser, even though he or she has a political persuasion. Presumably, what was going through David Cameron’s mind in 2012 when he appointed Milburn to the job driving Tory social mobility policy was that it would make his government look broad-minded and caring. That was, after all, what Cameron was all about – he was above all else a one-man PR operation to ‘detoxify’, as he saw it, the Conservative brand.
But there was a rather fatal flaw in Milburn’s appointment, as there would in any appointment of a former opposition minister to a government job.
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