Chris Grayling is very good at his job.

“Nonsense!” shouts the crowd, “He has the reverse Midas touch and turns everything to shit.”

I used to think this, up to and including messing up the railway franchises and the ferry contract with the company that owned no ferries, but after reading about his latest debacle (the botched ‘privatisation’ of probation services), the penny has dropped.

He is clearly bad at privatising things – but his job description isn’t ‘privatise things well’, it is ‘privatise things badly’, and he is very good at that, a 100% track record so far. And anybody with half a brain must know that you cannot ‘privatise’ core functions of the state, like probation services, or indeed HM Land Registry.

That is the only rational explanation, people wail about the shocking cost to the taxpayer, but from the point of view of the contractors, the lawyers, the consultants and other middlemen, those are corresponding huge gains.

I assume that with all these things, the recipients make large donations to the Conservative Party and/or offer cost non-exec directorships to senior Conservative politicians, which is the object of the exercise from Chris Grayling (and whichever Prime Ministers appointed him/didn’t sack him).