Guido has never understood why since the Second World War governments, all allegedly committed to decentralisation, maintained the waste of money which is, or rather was, the Central Office of Information. The COI was formed in 1946 out of the Orwellian Ministry of Information and was for many years the biggest spending advertiser in Britain, splurging millions on nanny state public information messsages. Notoriously COI spending invariably went up most in pre-election years. The whole ethos of the COI was “Big Government” knows best.

In what signals an important cultural change “Mad” Frankie Maude hasn’t reformed or streamlined the COI, he has closed it. That is the kind of quangocidal decentralisation we need to see more of from the government…