Williamson wouldn't have got a job as a tea boy in any cabinet before May's and wouldn't have become defence secretary if he hadn't been chief whip beforehand.
Hastings says the cabinet "cries out for reinforcement by some men and women competent to get stuff done" and claims:
"Today there are men and women on the back benches, starting with Jeremy Hunt, Tom Tugendhat, Greg Clark, Edward Timpson and Stephen Hammond, who would make far more plausible ministers than those we have got. Their elevation depends, however, on Johnson, or perhaps Dominic Cummings, relaxing their marking of the loyalty exam all candidates are required to pass before being considered for admission."
None of these are intellectual giants anyway in my opinion although they are head and shoulders above the present members of the cabinet.
But this is just one of the many conundrums and contradictions facing Johnson - although I am not sure he even realises it. Those with a modicum of talent don't believe in Brexit and, as I have often said on this blog, those who do are invariably half wits. Hastings again:
Moreover, prime ministers must choose colleagues from a limited pool of remotely capable people. If they require office-holders to display blind fealty, they get compliant bunglers. Leaders who possess wisdom and self-confidence are willing to pay a price for talent, which includes knowing that their big beasts privately mock them, as was the fate of Harold Wilson at the hands of George Brown, Dick Crossman and Roy Jenkins.
But Johnson cannot do that. He does not like the idea of sitting at the head of the cabinet table surrounded by men and women intellectually superior to him but in his case unless you scoured special needs classes you would be hard pushed to find anyone intellectually inferior.
He is incompetence made flesh. He can't even dress himself properly and bumbles about "manically disorganised" with zero understanding of what goes off around him, Witness his pledge that there will be a border in the Irish sea "over my dead body" when he has already signed up to it lock, stock and barrel in the Withdrawal Agreement! It is farcical. Gove and Brandon Lewis are forced to parrot the same thing even as border control posts are being built and IT systems purchased for importing and exporting.
Control of the government machine in Whitehall is being drawn every more tightly towards the egomaniac Cummings who thinks that his quack remedies and pseudo science is the basis for wholesale reform of the entire civil service. This is like driving a Rolls Royce through a waterlogged field, complaining it isn't up the job and that you intend to redesign it.
So, Johnson has chosen to have the nation governed by an incompetent control freak and the "maoist" Gove though a cabinet of compliant bunglers and we are now seeing the result of it. They are driving a bulldozer through the constitution (such as we have anyway), the planning system, education, industry and everything you can think of including our overseas trade and reputation for honest dealing.
I know a few people who were and still are in favour of Brexit. I also know plenty of others who opposed it but were worried that the government would make a success of Brexit and it would somehow take years to reverse. I don't subscribe to that view and I remain convinced that we can be governed well and effectively or we can have Brexit but not both. The two things are mutually exclusive and sooner or later the voters will discover it too,
We have taken back control in order to hand it to people who are singularly incapable of exercising control over anything.
