Rupert Redwald is an expert on governance and appointments in the public and private sectors.
Peak woke – like peak oil – is a moment always apparently on the horizon but never actually reached. The happy reality of our material world is that oil is still the new oil – we are discovering new sources of hydrocarbons every day and it will be many decades before the last well runs dry. Less happily, woke is still rampant, flowing through the boardrooms just as the Suez Canal was said to lap through Lady Eden’s own drawing room.
The fall of Olly Robbins and the renewed focus on what the Prime Minister actually knew about Peter Mandelson’s appointment returns acute attention to the one man who genuinely holds Keir Starmer’s fate in his hands. There are important questions about the double standards at play here, and their possible causes Sir Laurie Magnus is the Prime Minister’s ‘independent adviser on ministerial standards’, and he has the power to initiate an investigation into every aspect of the PM’s own conduct. He is a banker by background, but this does not quite do him justice. He is a silken but steely courtier with commercial experience and integrity: a rare bird in Whitehall.
Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow to action but quick to push its ideological agenda in all manner of insidious ways. Wrong. Or rather, this is only the half of it. Whatever the gargantuan size of the state compared with pre-pandemic, what few people realise is the extent to which the private sector has been incubating its own Blob for years. To illustrate how Blob PLC can achieve its ends and – crucially – why people have gone along with it, we must follow its successful campaign to make British business bow to the diversity gods, and how it started at the very top – with the boards.
