"JOHN HUTTON came before us yesterday with the toughest shake-up of the welfare state in years. It was vital that he hide this fact and so he deployed his extensive camouflage skills. The spies who hide transmitters in fake rocks could learn a thing or two from Mr Hutton.
In fact, Mr Hutton may be a sort of human fake rock, if there can be such thing. On the outside he looks all shiny and smooth and . . . well, normal. He blends, as rocks do, into the landscape. But on the inside lies the steel heart (which also doubles as a transmitter) of an ambitious technocrat...
He talked fast. He talked politics and, it must be said, for those of us who don’t speak welfare technocratese, he talked nonsense. He kept referring to “gateways” and “pathways”. To the uninitiated he seemed to be wandering round a garden centre. But Hutton’s World is a murky place where almost nothing, and especially rocks and pathways, is what it seems."
How nice to see the proper use of the subjunctive in the second sentence of the first paragraph above.
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