Don't Do That

Isn't Patricia Hewitt awful? She is like a character played by Joyce Grenfell. Except that, at least intentionally, she is in no sense a joke. On the contrary, she could not possibly take herself more seriously.

Note that it is no longer considered newsworthy that a sitting Labour MP and former Health Secretary is now mostly a paid lobbyist for private healthcare. Note how she, entirely matter-of-factly, treated all the Westminster Village think tanks in general, and Policy Exchange and Demos in particular, as a single organisation, and that motivated by absolutely nothing except pecuniary greed. Note her equally nonchalant, and equally accurate, treatment of the circuses that are now the party conferences. And note her utter contempt for constituencies and constituents.

Hewitt has form, and plenty of it. I do not just mean her securing of employment from Neil Kinnock by writing him a gushing letter of support during his Leadership campaign, exactly the same as the one sent simultaneously to Roy Hattersley. For its role in the DeLorean swindle, Arthur Andersen was for many years banned from government contracts, and a protracted action was undertaken to recover the money stolen from the British taxpayer.

But within about five minutes of New Labour's election, Patricia Hewitt, lately Head of Research at Andersen Consulting, had ensured both the lifting of that ban and the ending of that action. During her time at the DTI, she blocked every effort to prevent auditors from selling the services that they were auditing, and she attempted to limit their liability if they signed off dodgy or downright fraudulent accounts, as Andersen did for Enron.

Even more than Byers, Hewitt is the ultimate, the archetypal New Labour figure, of exactly the kind that would be restored to running the country under David Cameron.