We’ve all made those meals. The hastily prepared tomato sauce that tasted of nothing, mixed into your pasta. And yet somehow through a combination of laziness and misplaced hope that maybe, just maybe, it will taste better once it rests, you just don’t seem to be able to throw it in the compost bin, and so instead you reheat it the next night, adding some beans, paprika and other guff to transform it into an equally unpalatable chilli. By the end of the week, you’ve still not managed to go shopping,, can’t afford to eat out and out comes the chilli, this time to ruin a previously innocent baked potato. That night you leap out of bed covered with a sweaty film of regret, a rush of tomato, bean, potato and bile rushing up your throat and decorating your toilet.The leftover tomato topping sits patiently in the freezer awaiting its next culinary promotion.
Chris Grayling is that tomato sauce. The man has the unerring ability to botch almost everything he touches, and yet somehow this brilliant government of ours seems unable to ditch him. We’ve all worked with this middle-aged man: he’s the grating greyscale colleague constantly falling upwards because senior management never seem quite able to tell him that he’s just not that good at his job. Heaven forbid they puncture a grown man’s pride. And so they just move him to another role, often one higher up. As long as he’s away from his old desk and wearing a new tie the hope is, presumably, that he’ll have magically transformed, like a home counties version of Knight Rider, into someone capable. The reality is, this never happens, and so the vicious cycle continues.
Grayling’s latest incarnation? Heading the intelligence committee that will finally decide how, when and whether to release that rather important report on Russian interference in UK democracy.
You may think I’m being unfair. You may say that this tired-looking chipolata in a grey suit is just the whipping boy for a disgruntled country and a divided left. But it doesn’t take much to recall that this is the man who, as transport secretary, awarded a £13.8m ferry contract to a company that didn’t own any ferries. That tiny oversight cost the government a new £33m contract with Eurotunnel in order to settle a legal action. Lest we forget, this legend’s earlier move to change rail timetables led to one in 10 Northern and Thameslink trains being cancelled.
This is the genius who, while working as justice secretary, privatised a large chunk of the probation service – a criminal cock-up that five years later the government is having to reverse with its work under the National Probation Service and that, according to one report, will cost taxpayers at least £171m. If that wasn’t enough, he banned books for prisoners sent from friends and family and limited the number of books prisoners could have in their cell, until a judge finally ruled that this was unlawful (as well as inhumane, stupid and cruel). The man is liquid failure, pouring across all the major offices of state.
It’s not Grayling’s fault that he’s a totally hopeless politician. He can’t be expected to grasp the finer details of whether ships exist or how trains move. The fault is with the ingrained culture of privilege that means a middle-aged white man can all but strip naked, rub his sagging buttocks across the green baize of the House of Commons, set his ministerial documents on fire with a fat blunt and sing a rousing chorus of Oops Upside Your Head through a vuvuzela before his bosses consider giving him the push. This goes way beyond Teflon. The man’s politically immortal. We’ll never get rid of him. And I bet he can’t even make a decent pasta sauce.
• Nell Frizzell is a journalist
