The National:

MARXISTS have taken over British society and all will be lost unless we take the lead of Ron DeSantis by taking on the woke universities and hiring some management consultants to shake up the “blob” civil service.

That’s the frankly mad take of Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath who claims disciples of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci have seized power at the heart of all our major institutions and shaped it in their own grey, Sovietised image.

In a piece for the paper’s sister daily title Heath writes that the woke blob is to blame for everything from attacks on the Home Secretary Suella Braverman to the colossal failure that is HS2.

He wrote: “Enough is enough: the Civil Service has gone too far in its war against a Tory Government it all too often appears to despise.

The National: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924), Russian revolutionary, making a speech in Moscow. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images

Simon Case, the head of the UK civil service, gives a speech in Woking earlier this year 

“The odious briefings, the targeted leaks, the trouble-making, the campaigning against the Government’s own policies on immigration, Brexit and tax: who do these people think they are?”

Unelected bureaucrats have, he goes on to explain, weaponised everything from net zero commitments, the Equalities Act to refuse “legitimate requests” from ministers to get on with their jobs by calling this bullying.

This is a tactic set out in some of Gramsci’s later works – The Prison Wokebooks: How to get Dominic Raab fired because he won't let you work from home.

But there is one man who shows the way forward – Ron DeSantis, the only real rival for the next Republican party’s nomination for president next year.

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DeSantis is perhaps best known in this country so far for being so far to the right he took on Disneyland for being too woke.

Heath gushes: “DeSantis controls the apparatus of state in Florida. He realises that in a modern society political power is also exercised by state-funded institutions such as the universities, and by the private sector via woke capital.

“He sees that all these left-wing power centres need to be confronted, or else victory at the ballot box means nothing, a lesson the Conservatives must urgently learn if they are ever to rule again.”

 He goes on: “As DeSantis realised, simply preventing the cancellation of the last remaining non-Left wing holdouts isn’t enough: defeating wokery must become official policy across Government.

“The job of private firms should be to make money legally, not to engage in political campaigning. In a world where followers of Gramsci have seized control of virtually all institutions, winning elections or referenda isn’t enough. The blob must be defeated.”

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But has Heath himself fallen prey to the woke blob at the heart of Telegraph towers? His dig at the followers of Gramsci falls just short of crying “cultural Marxism” at his opponents – an accusation now verboten because it’s sometimes considered dogwhistle antisemitism.

Have The Telegraph editors themselves been taken over by the blob? It can’t be… Can it?