Brexiteers should be deeply worried that Oliver Letwin has been put in charge of the civil service Brexit unit.
Yesterday, he faced questions about it from the Foreign Affairs Committee and didn’t exactly impress, suggesting that before June 23 very little contingency planning was done in Whitehall to prepare for Britain quitting the EU.
It’s not just the fact the Letwin wanted Britain to remain in the EU, though that of course brings its own concerns.
It is more that Letwin is staggeringly incompetent.
This is the man who in June 2015 decided to give Kids’ Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh £3 million of taxpayers’ money – despite having been told by senior civil servants not to do so because it would be a complete and utter waste of public cash.
In his wisdom, Letwin ignored the advice and handed over the money anyway. Who knows how it was frittered away?
As if that were not bad enough, Letwin had previously approved other payments of £4.3 million to Kids’ Company in the five months before the dodgy charity folded in August 2015.
An official report branded Letwin’s decision “an unjustifiable way to conduct Government business and handle public money”.
That is surely putting it politely.
Letwin is guilty of several serious slip-ups since he became an MP in 1992.
Among the greatest was his decision to agree a deal (over a pizza) with Labour Party representatives and the protest group Hacked Off to pass Britain’s first press laws in 300 years.
Batmanghelidjh and Hacked Off ran rings around Letwin.
Imagine what the EU bureaucrats will do.
