THE trouble with being in the public eye is that when something goes wrong you are still there.

Even hiding under the duvet won’t make it go away. Actually, it sort of does, except that you can probably still hear the phone you are pretending you can ignore.

The comfort that Jeremy Maçon can draw is that this week’s little fiasco comes under the heading of dust-settling, and the embarrassment will eventually fade. Just ask Members who have had one too many snifters at their post-election parties and made inappropriate comments in front of reporters if you want to know precisely how long the process takes.

The smiles of last week’s election win must have seemed a long, long way away when the e-mail exchange between Deputy-elect Maçon, or his mother, and Deputy Geoff Southern was leaked earlier this week.

Post-election hiccups aside, however, the point made by the e-mails and the eventual warning from Deputy Southern to ‘ditch the mother’ is a very serious one. Consulting people you trust and canvassing views is one thing. It is quite another to be apparently reliant on the views of someone else.

Even worse, if that someone else happens to be your mother, Nellie Maçon, and you are the youngest States Member ever elected, then it really is the set-up for a quick fall on to a very hard surface.

And unfortunately it confirms the worst fears of those who feel that 21 really is too young to have a rounded enough view of the world to stand for government. As starts go, this is not a great one.

It was going to be hard enough anyway for Deputy-elect Maçon to gain the respect and counsel of his fellow members and to convince them that in spite of his youth (or indeed because of it) he had an opinion worth their consideration. At his age he was going to have to work harder than most for that. Now it is going to be even more difficult. Word is already out that the 54th seat in the States Chamber has been dubbed Nellie’s seat.

What is even more difficult is that despite the embarrassment — compounded, it has to be said, by the television interview he gave in the wake of the leaked e-mails — the minute he became elected it stopped being about him, on his own. He is a representative of his constituents now, and is going to have to gulp and get on with it and represent the people who entrusted him with their vote. Well, it’s either that or resign.

He will also need to work hard to convince those who did vote for him that it really was him they voted for and not his mother, especially when many of those voters were probably at the younger end of the spectrum and were looking to vote a youthful voice into the assembly.

It is easy to forget that running for public office is just that — public. Having nowhere to hide goes with the territory. It’s a bit like eating brussels sprouts . . . misjudging this is an error you only make once. But it is quite strange that just because a job is public we expect those carrying it out to be instantly polished and accomplished rather than seeing it as the steep learning curve that comes with any new job.

Quite apart from the Maçon family conundrum, however, there is another disquieting aspect to the string of e-mails between the Maçon and Southern accounts, and that is the discussion over the backing for Chief Minister.

First of all, it points to one of the side-effects of ‘leaks’, which is that they rarely affect just the people first targeted but have a sort of ripple effect spreading to others who were just, in a sense, innocent bystanders.

It is like those horrible occasions at school when you have been saying nasty things about a teacher — maybe even using swear words — only to find that he is standing on the other side of your locker door. Once again, like brussels sprouts, if you’re smart it only happens once.

Among those discussed in the Southern e-mails were St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft and St Saviour Deputy Roy Le Hérissier.

The former does not appear to have enamoured himself over the years to Deputy Southern, who described the father of the parish he serves as ‘dishonest, lazy and incompetent’. The parish’s Christmas drinks should be a hoot.

It is altogether possible that Mr Crowcroft knew that the Deputy should not be counted among his biggest fans, but it is rarely gratifying to see such comments in print. Perhaps he has similarly complimentary things to say about the Deputy for St Helier No 2.

The Deputy’s assessment of Dep-uty Le Hérissier was perhaps slightly less insulting in that being a ‘fence-sitter of the worst calibre’ implies, to my mind anyway, that some thought has been given to a subject.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that people should beware those who find the fence too difficult to climb because it usually means that they are so entrenched in their own opinion that they are incapable of seeing the other side of any argument.

Anyway, with all of that, you have to hope that politicians in general have made better cases for their choices for Chief Minister than appears to be the case from these e-mails. If that is the level the discussion has come to, we really are in trouble.

WHILE I think of it, and for no particular reason other than having mentioned them in the previous piece, I may just mention brussels sprouts again before Christmas is done with. They play on my mind at this time of year because you can never quite get far enough away from them.

They seem to crop up on tables all over the place, polluting other perfectly fabulous vegetables with their sproutiness.

I have even seen them on Christmas cards this year. If this is the start of a hostile takeover, we ought to be told. It won’t be pretty.