It’s not surprising that Esther McVey has nothing to do. She is, after all, the “minister for common sense” – a made up job with a made up mission to tackle a made up problem. What is surprising, however, is that she should have the temerity to tell others that their job is pointless, given the utter vacuity of her own.

McVey is like a particularly small fish circling an empty tank. Is the fish content? Does it know that everything it does is pointless? Is it aware of its own existential redundancy? Or, without any context of the world outside, does it imagine that each flick of its tail, each gaze out the glass, constitutes a moment of pivotal historic importance?

These were the sorts of questions one could rightfully ponder when McVey made her speech about diversity in the Civil Service to the Centre for Policy Studies this week. Certainly they were more meaningful questions than anything raised by her own contribution. Her proposals were, by turn, false, misleading, semi-comprehensible, and self-defeating.

Her most concrete plan was to ban civil servants wearing rainbow lanyards. Lanyards. That is the object of her concern. Amid all the things that are happening in the world, and indeed in our own country under the authorship of her own Government, this is what was occupying her thoughts. And after all, who would dare question it? It’s just common sense. “They should be a standard design reflecting that we are all members of the government delivering for........

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