KEIR Starmer’s former head of political strategy caused a minor sensation last week, bemoaning what he termed “the stakeholder state”.

Paul Ovenden was writing in The Times about why a government with a huge majority is still struggling to get anything done and is constantly distracted by issues that bemuse the public, such as the release of Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, which generated embarrassing headlines over the new year.

Ovenden blamed the “complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations... incubated by a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department – one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning”.

This sounds like “the blob” – the term used in similar complaints by Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings and Conservative former education minister Michael Gove.

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But Cummings and Gove believed the civil service was part of the problem and they accused the blob of a left-leaning agenda.

Ovenden described the civil service as just another casualty of “the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to........

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