The former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has said that she wished she had been better trained for the role, pointing out that she had "never worked for a major organisation" in her life.
"When Gordon Brown offered me the Home Office, I thought, 'Great! I can sit in my sister's back room - which also happens to be my main residence, no really - all day long with a bottle of liebfraumilch, watching DVDs and voting on the internet, instead of trudging into Westminster every day'," admitted the MP.
"Imagine my surprise when some civil servant rang up and told me the police had foiled some would-be terrorists who had parked a bomb-laden car in Mayfair," she told Total Politics magazine. "I said, 'Well, good for them, but why are you telling me this?' and he told me I was responsible for the Metropolitan Police, as well as the formulation and implementation of the UK's overall anti-terror strategy. Bugger me, I nearly fell off my swivel chair."
Ms Smith criticised the cabinet system of British politics for reshuffling ministers into jobs for which they had no aptitude or experience, saying: "I hope I did a good job, but if I did it was more by luck than by any kind of development of those skills. It's ridiculous really, this whole silly system of electing a useless bunch of dolts in some kind of national popularity contest every few years. What we need is some kind of self-perpetuating meritocracy, in which the country is run by unelected, unaccountable officials who have a far better understanding of big affairs of state than Joe Public."
"Basically, what I think, right, is we ought to hand over the country to the civil service, the police and private enterprise, yeah?" said Ms Smith before being distracted by Dickinson's Real Deal on the telly.
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