The Terminator

I have a sneaking suspicion that the Secretary for Non-idle Poverty, James Purnell, is a time traveller. Purnell has attracted previous notice from your correspondent with his promise, as Cultchah Secretary, to bring about a cost-effective, world-class renaissance in British art which would put us on a par with fifteenth-century Italy. If Jonathan Yeo is to fulfil the role of Leonardo, I humbly volunteer for that of Savonarola.

Now Purnell and the Glorious Successor have announced an acceleration of what is euphemistically called "welfare reform", in much the same way as cutting public sector pay to feed investment bankers might be called "redistributive taxation". Purnell noted that "We should not be ideological about who provides the service - we should just work out who is best at providing it." Since rampant privatisation is not an ideology, "private firms such as McDonald's" have worked out as fulfilling this criterion, and thus will be allowed to award skills qualifications; hence my hunch that Purnell has discovered the secret of time travel or, more likely, appropriated it in cost-effective fashion from someone with a larger brain and a less hypertrophied organ of self-interest.

In more innocent days, time travellers would go back and try to make their fortunes by inventing the safety pin; but the descendants of New Labour's Britons will be made of sterner stuff. It is doubtless future-imperfects like Purnell who will go back to bestow Theosophy upon the nineteenth century, perpetual motion on the eighteenth, witch-hunting on the sixteenth, and Christianity on the fourth, once it has been worked out who is best at providing them. As with these afflictions, as with identity cards, faith schools, the Private Finance Initiative and Operation Iraqi Liberation, what matters is not usefulness, or even harmlessness, but a correct degree of profit for the right people. Purnell, given his record, probably got a second-class degree in ratburger with relish during the third or fourth decade of the present century and has come back here among the primitives to ensure that nobody will be born with sufficient education to prevent the final and ultimate victory in the war on privacy, the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Da Vinci Code and the supreme and unrelenting Cultchah which spawned James Purnell. It's the sanest explanation I can think of.