Reshuffle: Is Mrs May Corbyn’s agent?

Surely not. I can’t imagine her surreptitiously sabotaging her own party to make sure the Trot is ensconced at 10 Downing Street.

However, neither can I imagine how differently Mrs May would have handled the cabinet reshuffle if she were indeed Corbyn’s sleeper. In fact, the troubled waters she has created are ideal for subversive demagogues to fish in – even if this wasn’t Mrs May’s desired outcome.

She shows most palpably that, if the solipsistic maxim “I think, therefore I am” doesn’t work very well as first uttered, it doesn’t work at all the other way around. Mrs May is, but she doesn’t think – and least not as a statesman.

An expert card sharp can shuffle a pack in such a way that the ‘loaded’ half of it stays on top even after the pack is cut. Mrs May managed to pull the same larcenous trick with her reshuffle.

Present occupants kept four out of the top five posts, even though they’re dubiously, and the Chancellor not at all, qualified for the jobs. There was, however, a cull of white middle-aged men at the lower tiers, with their jobs going to women, blacks and other ethnic minorities.

Mrs May explained this sleight of hand by her desire to make “the government look more like the country it serves”. There goes that reversed Cartesian aphorism, proved false yet again.

Under no circumstances should the government of Britain look like Britain as she now is, at least not by deliberate design. Belief in the advisability of every group being proportionately represented in anything, and especially in government, is idiocy at its most disproportionate.

For a holder of this belief must also think that the essential qualities required for government are evenly represented among all demographic groups. Superior intellect, erudition, moral integrity, willpower, patriotism and so forth are all supposed to be spread in exact proportion to the numerical strength of each group, is that it?

But this is nonsense, and empirically demonstrable nonsense at that. Such qualities, especially a full complement of them, aren’t characteristic of any group – they’re strictly individual, and a political system succeeds or fails on its ability to find and elevate such individuals to government.

As I never tire of repeating, in this world we aren’t blessed with perfect systems, and no method of government has ever been entirely successful in selecting only those fit to govern. But at least some have tried, whereas the ideological, arithmetical method of choosing leaders is absolutely and unequivocally guaranteed to create a government of, for and by nonentities.

Suitability for the job, not the sex, skin colour or sexual orientation, should be the only requirement. This isn’t to say that women or, say, blacks can’t produce qualified ministers. They can – but only as individuals, not as a group.

I’d applaud a cabinet made up exclusively of women if they possessed the qualities I mentioned earlier. Yet this criterion clearly didn’t even come into consideration. The selection was done with the calculator, not the head.

And even the calculator didn’t work properly. Thus The Times laments that “Justine Greening’s resignation means David Mundell is the only gay cabinet minister.”

Yet the most extensive survey I’ve ever seen puts the proportion of homosexuals in Britain at under 1.5 per cent. That means they’re over-represented among the 22 cabinet minsters and, before Miss Greening’s unlamented departure, they were well-nigh prevalent in statistical terms.

Also, I’m willing to bet that all our ministers can read and write, the latter only after a fashion, but still. So who’s representing the illiterate majority in a country that consistently places near the bottom of most literacy and numeracy rankings?

And, with about half of all British children born on the wrong side of the blanket, are single mothers and fatherless ex-children adequately represented among the ministers? I bet not, although figurative bastards more than fill the appropriate quota.

As if this earth-shattering idiocy weren’t enough, Mrs May has turned government into the only job in Her Majesty’s realm from which people can refuse to be sacked. Can you imagine any company, big or small, where the stern statement “You’re fired!” could be met with a sterner “No I’m not. I refuse to go and you can’t make me!”?

Yet this is exactly the situation our lame-duck, lame-brained, limp-willed PM allowed to develop during the reshuffle. Several of her ministers refused to be sacked or moved sideways, and Mrs May didn’t have the gumption to get her way. She should have simply announced publicly that she’s unqualified to do her job – the effect would have been the same.

To answer the facetious question in the title, no, I don’t think Mrs May has dedicated the latter stages of her career to shoving a Trotskyite government down Britain’s throat. But, should she lose her present job, which will probably happen soon, I think Jeremy should seriously consider hiring her as his campaign manager.

He’d be hard-pressed to find within the ranks of his own party a candidate who could do more to promote his career. And Mrs May won’t even have to retrain.