The government has paid a whacking out-of-court settlement of £100,000 to Anna Thomas, a whistleblower sacked after she tried to warn them about the infiltration of the DWP by political activists. Baroness Falkner, chair of the equality watchdog, was placed under investigation after a spurious ‘dossier’ of complaints was compiled by staff, which just so happened to coincide with her steering the ship in a political direction some staff members didn’t approve of. The RAF despairs of ‘useless white men’; a civil service ‘diversity adviser’ describes women’s rights groups as ‘far-right’ and ‘genocidal’. Home Office staff are threatening to strike rather than implement the government’s Rwanda policy. These are merely the stories from the past week alone.

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how senior Tories can be so complacent and oblivious

And yet, after 13 years in office, it seems to be only now percolating through to the Conservative government that there might just possibly be a problem with an antagonistic and politicised civil service. The Telegraph’s Christopher Hope, reporting on the attempted ousting of Suella Braverman on laughably silly grounds, reports, ‘One senior former Conservative Cabinet minister WhatsApped me on Tuesday night. The message read: “I didn’t really believe in the ‘blob’ till now”.’

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how senior Tories can be so complacent and oblivious. It is under their stewardship that the country’s public institutions have become ever more colonised by the ideology of destructive progressivism, of bourgeois crank beliefs about race and sex – ‘decolonisation’ and ‘gender identity’  – imported from American academia. They have been asleep at the wheel, and only now their dormouse eyes are blinking a bit. ‘Gosh, that brick wall seems awfully close all of a sudden.’

Being overwhelmingly middle class themselves, and acutely conscious of being seen to be out of step with their peers, the Tories feel the social pressure of flowing with the current of their milieu. Boris Johnson was the perfect example of this, seeming totally embarrassed at the idea of making any pushback against progressivism – ‘there’s nothing wrong with being woke’ – which is another reason why his reputation among certain Tories as the usurped king over the water is so undeserved. One wouldn’t want to cause a scene, after all.

The most charitable explanation I can come up with for this syndrome is that maybe the closer you are to a thing, the harder it is to see it. Destructive  progressivism – EDI and the like – comes in a lavender-scented wrapping, a passive-aggressive parcel of ‘niceness’. It’s not political – perish the thought! – it’s simply being kind and modern and inclusive. Who could possibly be against niceness? What could conceivably be wrong with ‘anti-racism’ or opening up sex education to ‘experts’?

It is through such cracks in the social space that bad things get in to institutions. Each little step, each tiny increment, seems innocuous in itself. And then – suddenly – a Conservative government is in power when the RAF is putting people’s careers on hold because they’re the wrong sex and the wrong colour, and schools are hiding sex ed ‘resources’ from parents.

This is a very hard thing for many higher echelon Conservative politicians to confront and address. A firm response is a big ask, combining as it does social stigma from their class, admitting they’ve been played for fools, and exhausting demands on their energy and resolve.

At the risk of sounding like an armchair general, I think most of these issues could be fixed with a few quick spurts of well-drafted legislation, together with the gumption to ignore reaction, and – crucially – a determination to enforce any new rules. Does the government have the stomach for that, or even a coherent ideological framework across their various remits? After years of ostrichism they have finally dredged up their Academic Free Speech Bill – while at the very same time in the Online Safety Bill handing buckets of power to their opponents, who will be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of reporting nasty opinions like ‘men aren’t women’ to Ofcom. Do they have a death wish, or are they merely chronically naive?

When some try to push back they do it in a puerile, unserious way; witness Suella Braverman’s mortifying conference speech about ‘tofu-eating wokerati’. What exactly is she doing to get rid of them or at least reduce their influence – anyone know? We recently witnessed the even more bizarre spectacle of the Home Secretary addressing a splinter group of peeved conservatives and lamenting the state of her own brief after over a decade of her own party being in power. It was like an arsonist standing over a burnt out building, petrol still dripping from the Jerry can in their hand, saying ‘And which joker did this?’

And then there is the Gove take that this is all fringe stuff, a bit gauche to even bring it up, and addressing it will only distract the government from the vital day-to-day issues – the economy, immigration, the cost of living etc. Because of course, the government is making a really splendid fist of those. A government doing more than one thing at a time!? The very idea!

The Tories cannot blame anybody but themselves. They threw open the door and invited the progressive vampire to cross their threshold. It’s a bit late to notice that there may be something very unpleasant about that charming chap in the long black cloak when his fangs are embedded in your neck.