WELL, as my old granny would have said – although not with my choice of words – if you are going to cock it up then cock it up big, and between them the Council of Ministers and the Waterfront Enterprise Board seem to have achieved that objective.

Had she still been here she might also have used one of her favourite expressions when things were going wrong – where’s it going to end, my poor boy, where’s it going to end?

I find it difficult to chuck in my two bobs’ worth right now on what will undoubtedly become known as the Harcourt saga – I hope no one starts calling it something silly like Harcourtgate, although I admit that Las Vegasgate does have a certain ring to it – because more information seems to be coming to light on an almost daily basis.

Put mildly, it is all jaw-dropping stuff and it seems to me that at least one of the parties involved – and that can only be what I think is known as the preferred developer – committed what at best was an error of omission in leaving the boy Walker and the cabinet in the dark about the American lawsuit or at worst was contempt for the government of this Island.

No matter where Harcourt fall – and it seems to be somewhere between those two stools – most people to whom I speak, and generally speaking they’re the ones who have little say in such affairs other than to foot the bills with their taxes, seem to think that there is a massive question mark over both the Waterfront development and this firm’s involvement in it.

At the very least, people generally believe that the least that can happen is that the whole shooting match should be the subject of an unprecedented level of scrutiny in the first instance and, when those doing the scrutinising have completed their task, a rerun of the debate simply to see if that lot in the Big House come to the same decision when in possession of all the facts.

Almost as jaw-dropping to this simple country boy for whom a £1 note means eight half-crowns, ten florins, 20 shillings and 40 tanners, was the news that more than one in eight of the thousands employed by that lot in the Big House get – wait for it – £1,346.15 or more in the little brown envelope they shove in their back pockets every Friday lunchtime.

Of course, it’s very easy for people like me, who generally speaking know little of the workload of individuals in the public sector, let alone the expertise and experience they bring with them, to utter banalities such as ‘they’re all paid far too much’ and ‘we should start getting rid of some of them’.

That indicates that, despite my concern over what are, to very many of us crapauds, huge sums of money, I have a measure of sympathy for those faced with the stark choice between running a public service in which the philosophy is something along the lines of do we employ up to a standard, or down to a price?

It is an awful dilemma because if we do employ up to a standard – and thousands will demand that this should certainly apply to those responsible for health, education, the emergency services and so on – we will get the sort of shock many of us got when reading the report on salaries.

On the other hand, if we employ down to a price then I’m afraid that, human nature being what it is, what those using the services provided by the public sector will get is either the really dedicated who love the job and will do it for almost nothing (and I have referred some time ago to someone in the civil service who took a substantial drop in salary to take a job he really wanted) or, quite frankly, the mediocre who would probably struggle to get a similar salary in the private sector.

All that said, I always view with a measure of scepticism statements like that attributed to the Comptroller and Auditor General (who presumably has a salary to match the importance of his or her title) that ‘people on higher pay scales are not necessarily paid as much as their equivalents in the United Kingdom or in the private sector in Jersey’.

The reason I am sceptical is that I am old enough – and not yet senile enough, thankfully – to recall many years ago the revelation that a chief officer over here was receiving a higher salary than the person doing the same (titled) job for the then Greater London Council.

Going back for a moment to the Waterfront issue, I was intrigued, to say the least, to read the reasons why half a dozen of our elected representatives managed not to vote at the end of the recent debate.

Most intriguing of all was Deputy Paul Le Claire’s reason – he was apparently showing representatives of a tram company around the Island. Leaving aside the fact that, other than the coastal route between St Aubin and Gorey, most Island roads would be totally unsuitable for such vehicles, I hope the Deputy read the recent letter from Roger Bale.

Mr Bale, who usually limits his comments on public transport to the absence of taxis at the Airport at busy times or in inclement weather, made some excellent points about the paraphernalia which comes with trams – steel wheels and tracks being just one point – and rightly praised vehicles like Le Petit Train.

As I said recently, it seems that no sooner have that lot got a few quid in the kitty than they all want to spend it instead of shoving it in the modern equivalent of the Jersey Saving Bank’s special investment account for when it’s really needed.

And finally, I like the idea of those smiling speed indicators. If they do reduce speed can we have more of them?