The blob that ate Westminster

It’s easy to blame politicians. In fact, it’s a national pastime. The potholes, the immigration chaos, the NHS waiting lists, the housing failure—ask the average voter who’s responsible, and you’ll hear the usual names: Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, maybe even Liz Truss if they’re feeling nostalgic. But as James Price makes clear in a blisteringly lucid interview on The Skeptic podcast, the deeper problem isn’t who we elect. It’s who we can’t get rid of.

Price, a former senior special adviser under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, has seen the machine from the inside. He served in the Lords, Education, the Treasury, and the Cabinet Office. He’s been in the sausage factory—and he isn’t buying the narrative that politicians are simply too lazy or incompetent to govern properly. The real issue is that they’re barely allowed to govern at all. “Most special advisers,” he says, “have absolutely no authority. No imperium. You cannot boss around a civil servant. You cannot tell them to do anything.”

When a new government takes office in the UK, only around 200 people actually leave—about 100 ministers and 100 SpAds. The rest of Whitehall remains. In America, by contrast, thousands of political appointees come and go with each administration, wielding real executive power. They’re accountable, partisan and motivated to deliver. In Britain, the elected get titles. The unelected get power.

This isn’t just theory—it’s lived reality. Civil servants lie, stall and manipulate. One “little bit posh” official flatly told Price that MPs had been invited to an event. They hadn’t. When caught, he shrugged: “Yeah, you got me.” No consequence. No recourse. The only way to remove someone like that, Price notes, is to promote them. A minor anecdote—but revealing. At scale, this is how the British state functions: unelected, unaccountable and insulated from democratic direction.

Worse still are the quangos. Born of Thatcherite logic—decentralise, depoliticise, defang—they’ve metastasised into a parallel government. Regulators, executive agencies, oversight bodies—all run by the same class of civil service lifers, often housed in the same buildings as the departments they notionally diverge from. “You walk into the same door,” Price says. “Just with a different coloured lanyard.” They wield power without responsibility, budgets without scrutiny and ideology without correction. If a minister disagrees, they’re ignored. If the public disagrees, they’re deemed ignorant.

It’s this structure that explains why nothing ever really changes. From immigration to NHS reform, from energy to tax, the same personnel offer the same policies with the same assumptions, regardless of who’s in office. “Every single party that won from 1974 onwards pledged to reduce immigration,” Price notes. “What’s happened? Every single time—it’s gone up.” The blob doesn’t care who wins. It just resets its spreadsheet.

Even when a new minister arrives with ideas, the system is designed to smother them. Steve Barclay, as Health Secretary, wanted to roll out wider use of Ozempic-style weight loss jabs. The OBR said no. Why? Because civil service modelling scores immigration positively, but not digital health pilots. The same OBR that exists to safeguard against “budget irresponsibility” has presided over ballooning debt and deficit. Yet it remains in place, unquestioned and undisturbed.

Some of this is structural. Some of it is ideological. What Price describes is not just bureaucratic inertia—it’s a worldview. It’s why Liz Truss, for all her flaws, was probably right to suspect she was being undermined. It’s why civil servants who opposed the Rwanda scheme under the Tories are now smoothly administering its burial under Labour. It’s why, when you try to find out who’s in charge, you discover endless committees and secretariats reporting sideways or upward—but never to a minister.

The judicial class plays its part too. Human rights law, imported in the 1990s and interpreted expansively ever since, has given judges the power to block removals, override Home Office rulings and chip away at parliamentary sovereignty—all in the name of progressive modernity. Price recalls deportations halted because a partner “wouldn’t like the spicy food” in the country of return. Madness—but institutionalised madness. Once embedded in statute and fortified by precedent, it becomes politically untouchable.

So what’s to be done? Price is refreshingly blunt. Fire people. Repeal laws. Smash quangos. Don’t delay. Don’t consult. Prepare legislation in opposition and pass it in week one. Replace senior civil servants with politically accountable appointees. Cut funding to regulatory bodies that behave like shadow governments. Create parliamentary oversight for quangos. Pay top-tier salaries for elite public talent—and make them publicly visible and accountable, as in the US. If someone wields power, they should defend it in public.

It’s not a moderate prescription. But moderation has failed. The Conservative Party—Price’s own former employer—has spent 14 years tinkering. The result? A demoralised base, record immigration and public services run by ghost structures no one voted for. Labour, if it’s serious, will face the same obstacles. Without a plan, it too will be swallowed.

The good news, if it counts as that, is that the crisis is entirely self-inflicted. No foreign power imposed this system. No catastrophe made it inevitable. It was built by design, brick by managerial brick—and it can be dismantled the same way. As Price puts it: “We can fix all of this… with a few strokes of a pen.” We are not helpless. We are just governed by people who are.

Britain votes for change. The blob just changes its stationery.