TIMING, it is said, is one of the most important skills a stand-up comedian can have.

Without good timing even the best material can fall flat. A line that should by rights have an audience howling will leave them confused and befuddled, and casting longing glances to the exit, if it is not delivered precisely on time.
Consider, then, the Council of Ministers.

As stand-up comedians they would, all of them, be excruciating failures. Introducing a hideously unpopular tax just five months before an election – that’s bad timing. In fact, it’s the best argument I’ve heard against the accusation that they’re obsessed with spin and presentation to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

What sinister Machiavellian genius would time a new tax to coincide with an election? Anyway, I thought that you couldn’t get timing worse than that. And yet again, I was wrong. Because there will be a few anxious States Members casting a very nervous look at some fresh statistics in two days’ time.

Not the election results – they’re still nine days away – but the release of the latest workforce figures from the Statistics Unit. In an election in which population and immigration have been by far the most controversial issue, and in which the ministers responsible for the law regulating Jersey’s population via work control are both standing, the release of total employment figures a week before polling day is just … well, it’s godawful timing, that’s what it is.
For them.

And the three ministers standing for election will be less than entirely delighted about the timing of the release – which was set at the start of the year by the independent unit.
I’ve got no idea what the figures say – the Stats unit being entirely leakproof despite the best efforts of generations of journalists – but given that the ministers have set great store in the protections against unbridled population growth, it’ll be a good test on how good those protections are, and whether ministers are pursuing an agenda of population growth.

An observation: when we decided to pose a set of questions for the 21 Senatorial candidates, there were two in particular that we thought would be pretty easy. The first was ‘where do you stand on GST exemptions on food?’ and the second was ‘who do you want to be Chief Minister?’

No real problems with the first one from any of the candidates, but the second proved a bit more difficult.
In fact, only six of the 21 managed an answer. That left 15 candidates (three of whom just said ‘anyone but Terry Le Sueur’) who could not answer one of the most important and most straightforward of all the questions that we could think of.

To my mind, that shows a less than admirable approach to honesty and openness – particularly from people who have not even been elected yet.

A question: is there any point in these hustings events, and should we come up with something better?
I had the strange experience of visiting the ‘Meet the Candidates’ event at the Royal Jersey Showground in Trinity yesterday.

It had been going on for two and a half hours when I walked in, but it didn’t look too busy. In fact, the hall had a distinctly cavernous and empty feel to it. So I asked one of the candidates how many people had been in.
‘Not including supporters, less than ten,’ was his guess. Another candidate mournfully added that he hadn’t spoken to anybody at all.

Even if every parish hustings meeting was packed (they haven’t been) by new people coming to see the candidates (again, no – there’s a good dozen or so who show up every time), that’d only be 2,000 people out of an electorate of more than 55,000.

There has to be a better way of doing this. I can see the point in hustings for district Deputies and Constables, but there has to be some way of organising these things that reaches more than four per cent of the electorate.

I hope this is true, because otherwise I’m in a whole lot of trouble, but anyway … A mate, whose name must remain a tightly-guarded secret, tells me that he happened upon what my colleague Meridian would call ‘a most unusual and remarkable scene’ at the Co-op Grand Marche the other day.

Treasury Minister Terry Le Sueur being tightly gripped around the arm by a lady who was bending his ear about GST. Apparently this went on for quite some time. Did he engage in a mature and sensible debate? Did he attempt to win her heart and mind on the issue?

Apparently not. Apparently, he put his basket down on the floor and walked out of the shop. An encouraging sign from the only declared candidate to be our next Chief Minister?