THIS month David Cameron’s housing adviser, Alex Morton, left the prime minister to join lobbyists for housing developers. In 2010 Cameron warned about “corporate lobbying” being the “next big scandal waiting to happen.”

Cameron said that central to this lobbying were the “ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way.” Now Morton has left No 10 and been hired as a consultant to join “public affairs” firm Field Consulting. They promise to help corporations when they want to, in their words,  “influence a politician.”

Morton helped Cameron shift government spending from social housing to the housing developers providing for the better-off.

His new employer specialises in what it calls “political influencing” in the housing field. They represent Berkeley Homes — the property developer which made its small number of social tenants enter its otherwise luxury Tower Bridge high-rise through separate “poor doors.”

Field also represents Residential Land, Tory donor Bruce Ritchie’s luxury property rental firm. Another Field client, London property developer CapCo, is involved in the heavily criticised Earls Court “redevelopment” which has a very low proportion of “affordable” housing — just 11 per cent — thanks to Tory policies developed with Morton’s help.

And again, thanks to Tory policies, many of these “affordable” houses are actually more expensive than many London people can afford, because their prices are calculated at a proportion of already inflated London prices, rather than on what people can actually afford.   

Morton is an important hire for the lobbyists because they are mostly run by New Labour people like former Tony Blair media man Chris Rumfitt, so they need someone with Tory credentials.

Rumfitt gloated about hiring Morton, saying: “[He] has been pivotal in creating the government’s planning and housing policies” and “his knowledge of the government and the Conservative Party in this area is second to none.”

The Maids

TICKETS are still available for Jamie Lloyd’s production of Jean Genet’s play “The Maids” at London’s Trafalgar Studios, which ends on May 21. If you have the money or the time, snap one up: It’s a thrilling, disturbing and blackly comic parable of exploitation, rebellion and disgust.

Genet’s play is about two housemaids who, when their mistress is away, act out revenge fantasies, with one maid playing their boss.

Zawe Ashton (best known for her sharp comic turn in Channel 4’s Fresh Meat) and Uzo Aduba (who gives a gutsy performance as Crazy Eyes in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black) really tear up the stage with energy, flitting from emotions of anger, shame, playfulness, and frankly, perversion.

The acting is tremendous, and so is the staging: It is choreographed almost like a dance piece, with a minimal stage, some rubber gloves, brooms and a few dresses bringing the kind of psycho-Cinderella drama to life.

Comedy turns to tragedy and back to comedy again with a spray of furniture polish and a smear of make-up. Laura Carmichael gives a good supporting turn as the casually cruel Mistress, although Ashton and Aduba own most of the play.

It’s a good time to revive The Maids. Genet wrote the play from the dark psychological underside of the rigid exploitative hierarchies of 1940s France.

Thanks to the increasing gap between rich and poor and the increasing expansion of servile “service sector” jobs, it speaks pretty strongly to our age too.

This play talks to anyone who has ever felt bullied or pushed around or exploited, and has in turn harboured some fantasy of revenge or dream of getting their  own back. What it has to say is funny and shocking and a bit disgusting — but in a good way.

You are privatising the NHS, Cameron

LAUNCHING his “seven-day NHS” plans last year, David Cameron said “a lot of rubbish” was talked about Tory health service schemes. “They said we would privatise the NHS,” he complained. “It’s just not true.”

The latest accounts from one of Britain’s top 10 private health firms, Ramsay Healthcare, filed this April, tell a different story.

Ramsay is doing very well — you could even say it’s booming. Its turnover is a healthy £405 million, up £31m on last year. Ramsay’s profits have nearly doubled, from £8m to £15m.  

Except this growth isn’t coming from the cosmetic surgery or other private operations Ramsay does. In fact, Ramsay finance director Hiten Mehta says: “volumes for private insured and self-pay patients have fallen slightly year on year.”

So where has the extra cash come from? Ramsay says: “Growth continues to be driven by NHS volumes which now account for 75.5 per cent of admissions (up from 69.9 per cent last year).”  

This means that one of the leading providers of independent hospital services in England is actually almost totally dependent on the NHS.  

The firm is relying on current “growth in NHS volumes through Choose and Book” — the system that allows GPs to divert NHS patients to private hospitals. Private health profits are going up because NHS privatisation is going up: Ramsay’s profits don’t come from the “free market,” they come as a gift of NHS business from the government.

Ramsay relies on good relations with the government to keep this NHS  business growing. According to “transparency data,” Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt met unnamed Ramsay executives in September 2015 for an “introductory discussion.”

I  asked for details of the meeting under freedom of information rules, but the Department of Health said they must remain secret to preserve “a safe space within which ministers and senior officials are able to discuss issues, freely and frankly.”

Hunt needs to talk to NHS privatisers without voters knowing what they say.