No, to alll 3. He should not even be an MP. Let alone a minister.
This thread highlights a very interesting societal and political problem - human ability, or rather, the lack thereof.
Government ministers are completely convinced that they run the country. The country is completely convinced that the government runs the country. Even such bodies as the press or the financial markets are under the misunderstanding that the government runs the country - and nothing could be further from the truth.
The government is allowed to run off at the mouth and run up debts over stupid schemes like HS2 or the latest silly local health hubs or the NHS Reforms and Improvements Initiative. But these are just silly schemes to keep the febrile and the feeble-minded occupied.
They remind me of the Churchill doll we got from Churchill Insurance that said "Oh Yes!" and "Oh No!" when it was picked up. This became the favorite toy for our Great Dane at the time, called Samuel Augustus Vincent van Doghausen the Third. He carried Churchill everywhere, whilst Churchill protested, "Oh No!" from Samuel's mouth.
In the same way that Samuel was fully occupied by that doll, so are government ministers fully occupied by health hubs and Improvements and Reforms Initiatives.
"Who's a clever boy, then!" and some vapid MP with a dodgy CV wags his tail.
And thus it has been since the War. One collection of idiots after another are herded into a fenced-off area, where they make some of the most bone-headed mistakes imaginable. Nationalising the car industry, privatising at any cost. Nationalising steel, selling it off at a knock-down price. Giving away, well, selling for £400m, the wealth fund that today would be worth at least £2 trillion, probably more. Buying gold high and selling low. From the NHS to HS2, every government-driven scheme has proven to be a disaster!
The postwar history of politics in the UK reads like a series of stories about the mythical German village of Schilda - a village of fools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schildbürger
In the meantime, the country continues to be run by a select few senior civil servants at the Treasury who are also members of the infamous "Velvet Drainpipe," made up of the more numerate members of those select few.
These men - and they are all men - may wield great power, but the lie that governments govern is still believed and the time really must come soon when we stop believing that lie. The lie has always interfered with the healthy running of the country and quite honestly, the joke has gone too far.
At least, in the past, UK politicians were able to stand on their hind legs and speak in public. For the past few years, even that thin veneer of pretend ability has gone. The idiots of Schilda are now too stupid to even string whole and coherent sentences together.
When I read on the ONS website that food inflation was at 2%, I realised that the whole of government is now complicit in this lie. And I was reminded of a passage written by Solzhenitsyn -
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well. But they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.
