The Grownups Are Back In Charge?

South West Water will today be sentenced for having supplied water unfit for human consumption, leading to an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Devon in May 2024, making more than 140 people ill and hospitalising four of them. Ofcom is once again to investigate the Royal Mail for having come nowhere near its annual delivery targets, and for having managed the remarkable feat of doing even worse in the year to the end of this March than it did in the year before.

For all the Government's self-congratulation about the railways, the rolling stock remains in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Rent to whom? And for all that one of Tony Blair's many unsavoury employers, the regime of Paul Kagame, will not be paid any more British public money, whatever happened to the £700 million or more that Robert Jenrick paid to Rwanda to take four volunteers, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year?

Yet in the midst of this and so very much more, six pages of the latest Mandelson Files are given over to Georgia Gould, who was then the Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office as well as the Member of Parliament for the good burghers of Queen's Park and Maida Vale, getting the vote out for Peter Mandelson to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford. And he still lost. To William Hague. But Gould is now the Minister for School Standards. By such are we governed.