Rishi Sunak made a rare joke this afternoon that had a typically boring Commons Committee roaring with laughter.
The Prime Minister was being grilled by the head of the Constitutional Affairs Committee William Wragg, about comments made by Liz Truss that she was brought down by the “deep state”.
Mr Wragg probed: “What were your thoughts on the comments of your predecessor when she says she was undermined by the ‘deep state’?”
Trying to be diplomatic, Mr Sunak replied: “I think that’s probably a question for her rather than me.”
However probed further by Mr Wragg about whether there is a ‘deep state’ and whether the two of them are “part of it”, the Prime Minister chuckled and quipped: “I probably wouldn’t tell you if I was, Will!”
Amid laughter, he added: “We probably wouldn’t tell anyone else either!”
In February, Ms Truss told the US Republican CPAC conference that she was taken on by the establishment, much of the opposition coming from within the state itself.
She told the right-wing gathering: “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.”
Asked to explain the meaning of a “Quango”, she replied: “A quango is a quasi-non-governmental organisation. In America, you call it the administrative state or the deep state. But we have more than 500 of these quangos in Britain and they run everything.”
Among the accused bodies were the Environment Agency, OBR, Bank of England and Judicial Appointments Commission.
She continued: “There’s a whole bunch of people – and I describe them as the economic establishment – who fundamentally don’t want the status quo to change because they’re doing quite fine out of it.
“They don’t really care about the prospects of the average person in Britain and they didn’t want things to change and they didn’t want that power taken away.”
In a subsequent article on Fox News, Ms Truss said agents of “the left” are active in the administrative state and “the deep state”.
