WHO runs Britain? May, Hunt, Hammond, Gove and Rudd might be the big decision-makers but control over huge swathes of our country is entrusted to bloated behemoths (insert your own Boris Johnson joke here).

If you had stopped people in the street a few weeks ago and asked them what Carillion did then you would have been met with a lot of shrugs and blank looks. The same could apply to Sodexo, Accenture, Interserve, Atos, Serco, Capita, and scores of other faceless businesses running services which control our lives.

G4S is probably the most famous of these outsourcing firms but that’s because they’ve been hit by so many scandals they have become a household name. Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to G4S fiascos, with 17 sub headings - from Olympic Games security to prison riots.

Carillion’s collapse means they are now the talk of the nation for the wrong reasons yet it is difficult to describe exactly what the company was. Commentators call them a ‘building firm’ but they were way more than that. They built and helped run schools, hospitals and army housing, operated libraries and prisons, constructed football stadia, roads, airports, in fact there was barely a part of British life they didn’t bid to take on and squeeze out a profit margin, in many cases caring little for the subcontractors who did their work.

Carillion’s tale of greed, cack-handed management, and the governments that kept trusting them, should concern anyone who cares about how our country is run and the way taxpayers are exposed to huge risks to help underwrite the puffed-up ambitions of private enterprise.