Hey, Britain! Meet Mr Maxwell, our new National Tech Advisor

Whoope feckin do, it's not CERN.

Maybe not, but with clueless old Etonians filling the senior ranks of the Tory, where else would they turn?

How can you tell if someone's an old Etonian?

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They tell you.

Moar Eton!

Is it some kind of sect? If it were in Texas it'd probably end in a bloodbath.

Non-job

Please, please, please somebody tell me this is a "promotion" to an out of the way non-job where he can be safely ignored by all and sundry and can't do any more pointless and very expensive interfering?

Just paying him £140k per year to garden will save the taxpayer vast sums compared to how much his interference has cost in the past.

Must be a good thing, surely.

As the great and good that run the country so well have mostly been through Eton I can only assume that the staff must be excellent.

Why wouldn't we want one of them in an influential position?

What could be wrong with that?

How about doing some research, commenters?

Interesting to see that obviously no-one in the comments thus far has done any research to see what Liam Maxwell has actually done and presumed everything from him being head of IT at Eton.

I don't even work in government IT but can see the positive influence he has had so far. The givernment IT work putting enterprise IT to shame is the stuff coming from Mr. Maxwell. It's time for people to do some reading...

Liam Maxwell has had a HUGE influence in how government IT is delivered. He is one of the drivers of using open data within government, allowing departments to share data in common, free and open formats.

He's championed the creation of registers of government information so again information can be shared between departments and have a verifiable source.

He has built the Government Digital Service as an IT platform by removing duplication and encouraging departments to share services and be open to providing information to other departments. Why should there be multiple systems for doing the same thing? This all saves huge amounts of money in wasted goverment IT spending.

However the major thing he's brought to government IT is breaking up the massive impossible to deliver contracts which have historically been won by poorly performing massive outsourcing companies. He has mandated no contracts can be over £100m and plans to go much smaller. Smaller contracts means more accountability and allows smaller providers to bid for part of the work. That smaller bit of work doesn't work or is being badly implemented, the contract for just that portion gets renegotiated or retendered, not the whole thing. He is likely to save the government many millions of pounds by this system which can then be put back into even better digital services for us taxpayers.

Seriously, this appointment should be cheered as it is putting into political office a true visionary for modern government IT who can shake up some of the other existing civil servants who are living in the IT dark ages.