In a review of my book Mr Osborne’s Economic Experiment in last weekend’s Financial Times, the former editor of the Economist, Bill Emmott, re-quoted the following remark once made to me by a Whitehall official: “Governments do foolish things. My job is to make sure they do foolish things properly.”
Emmott speculated that this quote was “possibly apocryphal”, but I can assure him it was not. What it was, however, was a typical example of the sense of humour never far from the surface in the civil service, and immortalised in Yes, Minister, the celebrated BBC comedy series, which was based on serious research. Some of my best Whitehall friends helped the writers, although I could not possibly comment on who they were.
People are going to look back on this period and conclude that this country has been afflicted by a kind of madness
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