Lord MacDonald’s confession that civil servants cried after Brexit vote is staggering yet depressingly predictable
Snivel service
IT is a staggering confession — and yet depressingly predictable.
The day after the Brexit vote the Foreign Office’s top mandarin shattered the civil service’s once-sacred neutrality and announced to staff he voted Remain.
Lord McDonald was on safe ground — they were busy weeping at their desks.
Remainers to the last man and woman, they assumed they would win by a mile.
They were at the heart of the Government machine.
Yet they simply ignored or mocked 17.4million mostly working-class Leave voters until it was too late.
Even then they did their best, alongside Remainer activists like Keir Starmer, to reimpose their will.
Now look at them. The more pragmatic europhiles swallowed their pride long ago and cracked on.
But others still pathetically wave nostalgic EU flags at the Proms, to the BBC’s delight.
They comfort themselves with the forlorn podcasts of Rory Stewart — the thwarted Walter Mitty of politics — dreaming, as he always has, of him magically becoming Prime Minister.
Most read in The Sun
None seem to have noticed the implosion of the supposedly mighty, liberal Brussels project they revere.
Germany, its engine room, is on its knees.
Right-wing parties are on the rise everywhere.
Yet still the Remoaners itch for Labour to evict the Brexit Tories and set us on some imaginary path to rejoining.
Still they bore on about Russian dark money and dishonest buses.
And still they sit in Whitehall, scandalously gumming up the works.
Zero sense
HE was a poor Chancellor but Philip Hammond isn’t always wrong. On Net Zero he is on the money.
Complacent politicians of all stripes, he says, are forcing through draconian eco policies without being honest with voters about the mind-boggling cost.
True. Though he was in No11 when Theresa May blindly signed us up to a 2050 deadline with no clue how to fund it.
And when Hammond says politicians have to “bring the public with them”, how? If the cost of battery cars or heat pumps remains prohibitive, persuasive patter won’t work. Then what?
Rishi Sunak must be more realistic.
Delay the arbitrary deadlines for banning oil and gas boilers and petrol cars until their replacements work just as well — and ordinary people can afford them.
Bar humbug
PUBS surely have too many problems to be battering punters with even pricier pints at busy times.
“Dynamic pricing” is grim enough when ticket sellers and airlines do it.
The last thing drinkers at Stonegate boozers want is a gratuitous surcharge at peak times.
Read More on The US Sun
Especially when the excuse is so woefully thin.
Drink elsewhere. They’ll get the message.