The real ‘blob’ that wrecked Britain is the Johnson and Truss right wing blob

Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings were on to something when they coined the term, writes Sean O’Grady. But they had it backwards – the real destructive force is much closer to home

But for almost a decade and a half, this particular ‘blob’ has terrified Britain (Photo Henry Nicholls - Pool/Getty Images)

Emerging at last from the shadow of his patron Boris Johnson, we find Simon Case, the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, actually doing the job that he should have been doing since Johnson hand-picked him for the post back in September 2020.

He has, belatedly, plucked up the courage to defend the hard-working and conscientious team of people he leads, who’ve been vilified and blamed for all the Conservatives’ policy disasters since at least the Brexit referendum. The “blob”, if you will, has fought back.

Though long overdue. Case’s defence of the ethos and performance of the civil service was forceful, and laced with a certain resentment, as if liberated at last to speak his mind a year after the fall of Johnson.

Asked by MPs at the Commons Constitutional Select Committee about the idea that there’s some “blob” dedicated to frustrating ministers and even plotting their demise, Case called the characterisation “dehumanising” and “totally unacceptable”. Which it certainly is. It is also backwards. There is a “blob” terrorising Westminster, but it isn’t coming from some phantom left wing coalition of civil servants, academics, “experts”, local authority officials and god knows who else, as originally characterised by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings when they arrived at the Department of Education at the dawn of the Cameron era – it’s coming from the Tories themselves.

The truth, of course, is the real “blob” is what you might call the “illiberal establishment” that has spent much of the period since the Conservatives’ return to power in 2010 growing and smothering common sense, facts and reality wherever it finds it. That is the real “blob” that has subsumed Whitehall in its malign, sticky goo.

It has been fed above all by the lunacies of Brexit, spurred on by the likes of Boris Johnson and his cronies; but also, the deranged intellectual input from all those single-cell organisms emanating from 55 Tufton Street in Westminster – the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and so on.

The “blob” is there wherever you look, manifested by right-wing free market fundamentalist spads, punk libertarians and their head-banging cheerleaders in their pet media outlets – almost all of the press, plus dedicated rightist fringe media such as Talk TV and GB News.

The illiberal, elite “blob” has spawned mini-“blobs” all over social media, shading into full-on fascism. These, in fact, are the people who run Britain, who have control of the media, the levers of government and a majority in the Commons. Of course they encounter resistance from free, independent bodies such as the Lords and the trade unions, and are still subject to scrutiny by parliament and the BBC.

The Conservative Party has used the term “blob” to cover for their abject failure to accept that their policies – and principally those on Brexit – were unworkable. It derives from The Blob, one of those dreadful 1950s sci-fi B-movies, about a giant amoeba that consumes everything in its path.

The term has been applied indiscriminately whenever a minister who doesn’t know what they’re doing has had that pointed out to them by a brave official. The most spectacular example was the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng mini-Budget, when they decided that the “blob” was so pernicious they wouldn’t even go near it. As such, they evaded the customary advice of the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, and even sacked the permanent secretary at the Treasury, Tom Scholar. Truss and Kwarteng subsequently blew up the gilts market, and blamed the “blob” for their mistakes anyway.

Priti Patel and Suella Braverman plus their allies cheerfully say the migrant crisis is all the fault of the “blob”, and if only it could be dissolved away by a politicised civil service, all would be well, and the boats would be stopped.

Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg blame the “blob” for Johnson’s ousting – this time the “blob” stabbed him in the back. They blame the “blob” for the inherent contradictions of Brexit, refusing to accept official advice that Brexit is incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement and retention of the bits of the EU we like.

But rather than blaming an amorphous conglomerate of mystery saboteurs, they should have looked inward instead. For almost a decade and a half, a hard right “blob” has terrified Britain. It’s so bad that even Case has decided to try and stop it. But, no different to Gove, he’s no Steve McQueen either.