Baroness Sally Morgan is not a happy quangocrat. This morning, it’s emerged that she is to lose her job as chair of the schools inspectorate Ofsted. Michael Gove is keeping her on until this Autumn, but won’t then renew her three-year term. In response, she’s putting it about that she belongs to a “fairly long list of people now who are non-Conservative supporters who are not being re-appointed.” She thinks that this is “extremely worrying”.
A little bit of extra information might be useful. Did you know that it was the Coalition Government that appointed Baroness Morgan, former director of government relations for Tony Blair, in the first place? Did you know that the number of political appointees admitting a Labour affiliation has dwarfed the number admitting either a Tory or Lib Dem affiliation during most years in past two decades? Here is a graph taken from a Policy Exchange report published in December:
Sure, that red line tailed plunged downwards last year – but it’s still around the same level as the blue one. As Mark Wallace said in a post at the end of last year, this isn’t about copying New Labour’s jobs-for-the-party-elites approach. But it is about context. Presumably, Baroness Morgan wasn’t complaining when 77 per cent of those appointees who admitted a political affiliation were Labour – in 2012, under the Coalition.