Brexit was supposed to be a triumph for the common people, fed up with a metropolitan-based elite getting all the gravy. Yet it is already evident that the first beneficiaries will be the usual suspects. Renegotiating trade agreements with not only the EU but also numerous other countries with which we previously traded under the EU’s umbrella requires “experts” of the sort that Michael Gove declared we’d all had enough of. So does freeing ourselves from EU regulations and replacing them with laws more to the British taste.
The government hasn’t enough such experts. So it is hiring help, at anything from £1,000 to £5,000 a day, from elite law firms, management consultants and accountants including Linklaters, McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Ernst & Young, all of them frequent beneficiaries of government contracts. The total cost could reach £5bn over a decade, taking quite a chunk out of the savings on EU contributions that were supposed to go to the NHS.
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