Very sensible stuff there from Willetts.

And he completely failed to address the question of how many more civil servants he would have to employ to compensate for the loss of the quangos…

But then it was a pathetic, cheesy, (and yeah, I remember the Yes, Minister episode, too – what a wonderfully educational series that was!) headline-grab, so maybe a sensible, detailed, fully-thought-through policy was too much to expect?

Successive Tory and Labour governemnts have been creating increasing numbers of quangos for the last 50 years. First, and most importantly, they have been created to carry the can for decisions where Ministers do not want to be blamed for. Secondly, other quangos have been created to remove decisions which might attract political credit out of the hands of other politicians; most often out of the hands of local councillors.

It is possible that Cameron has strong political virtues that I fail to percieve. However the likelihood of David Cameron accepting any blame that can be ducked, or of his letting other politicians receive credit un-necessarily, is negligible. It is not so infinitesimal as the chance of Tony Blair doing either of those things; but only because Cameron is less competent than Blair.

Somebody appears to be putting down good money to get the Tories to commit themselves to reversing unwelcome policies from regulatory quangos. Should the Tories gain power, the financiers of this lobbying are likely to find that they have bought some cjhages in window dressing; but very unlikely to have persuaded Cameron to take tricky decisions into his own hands.

I’m not aware that anything has actually changed since Yes, Minister went on air. That’s why it’s still so funny.

Except that quite often I feel like i’m stuck in a Yes, Minister time warp.

The Tories can shout all they want about cutting qunagos, I seriously doubt they will be able to do it.

Sir Humphry won’t let them.

Let us not forget that the Tories only hate one specific kind of quango – those they didn’t set up themselves. They love ones full of their chums, and we’re going to see a proliferation of those in the next few years.

It would be cheaper simply to nominate/appoint their own placemen – it’s what they did last time.

I am in no way a gigantic, self-contradicting hyperbole merchant, apart from those extremely rare occasions that I am, such as the point that you highlighted.

I made my point badly, which is that the Tories only dislike quangos that pursue aims that they don’t like, or that prevent them from taking direct control of things that they want direct control over. They like quangos that follow Tory agendas, and previous administrations will show that. However, you’re right – I overegged that particular pudding. Although I would be very surprised if the current head of Reform did not end up as the head of a new Tory quango (unless he goes straight into Government), and equally surprised if he does not expect that (unless he’s standing as an MP).

It is this hypocrisy that annoys me – the pretence that they don’t like quangos – along with the overt admission that they want to play politics with areas of public life that they should not play with.

However, to say that “They allow governments’s to financially reward their followers and buy support” (sic) is not true. That’s not the case now, and Labour have used quangos, in a lot of cases, to try to minimise their own involvement in areas they think other people should be running. Some are not very good (the Learning and Skills Council being a good case in point – doomed no matter who gets in), but this administration have actually been largely ok at binning those that are not up to scratch.

A lot of people really don’t understand what quangos do, what they are for, and how they do it. Doesn’t stop them from commenting on them, of course.

You know nothing at all about most quangos. Do you work for Reform?

Actually it would be so absurd for the Sun, Sky & Times to support Labour at the next election, and so unlikely to affect the result even if they did, that Murdoch has actually got the weakest hand he’s had in years.

So will Cameron use that advantage and demonstrate some independence of action and cojones?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha, As if.

“Take the Higher Education Funding Council for England, responsible for how much money universities should get. This is a fundamentally political question.”

It isn’t a fundamentally political question at all, and HEFCE do a decent job of making sure the cash is distributed reasonably. Amongst many of the other things they do. Not everyone will agree with how they do it, and they could stand to lose a few people, but they do it reasonably impartially and without excessive Ministerial interference (the policy has explicitly been that universities run their own affairs. This has, arguably, made the VCs more powerful than we’d like, but there you go).

The Tories don’t want the universities running their own affairs – Reform have confirmed it. They want to micromanage funding. There are a lot of bad ways to run a university system, but having all funding explicitly disbursed at the political whims of a Conservative minister – even if that minister is the able David Willetts – is about the worst I can possibly think of.

Let us not forget that the Tories only hate one specific kind of quango – those they didn’t set up themselves. They love ones full of their chums, and we’re going to see a proliferation of those in the next few years.