Baroness Token Resigns. Never Buy the First Pony You See

Saaeda Warsi – aka Baroness Warsi; aka Baroness Token – has announced her resignation from the Cabinet in a style entirely becoming her class, intelligence and sophistication: on Twitter.

With deep regret I have this morning written to the Prime Minister & tendered my resignation. I can no longer support Govt policy on #Gaza

— Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) August 5, 2014

Her departure will no doubt come as an enormous relief to the more traditional Conservatives in her party, many of whom felt that Warsi’s appointment to a Cabinet post – even one as meaningless as “Minister for Faith and Communities” had less to do with her brilliance, integrity and raw talent than it did to Cameron’s desperation to get his first Asian Muslim female on the books. One of them once described Baroness Token to me as a classic example of “Never buy the first pony you see.”

The problem with appointments based on political correctness is that they can come back to bite you. If you’ve been promoted on the basis of talent, then you will stand or fall on your abilities and success when you are in post.

But if you’ve only been promoted because you fit the right sexual/racial/religious profile, you’re really under no obligation to be anything better than perfectly useless at your job – because the appointment was never about your skills but merely about the convenient accident of your birth.

So it proved with Warsi. She had one mission: bring the “Muslim community” onside. Instead, with her intensely annoying combination of monumental entitlement, weapons-grade stupidity and purblind cultural relativism, it often seemed as if she was doing the exact opposite.