LAST week’s gathering in the Big House may well have been an insignificant affair when compared with what was on the menu for some of the States sittings of the last few years but to this simple country boy it may well have the potential to prove one of the most expensive there has been in recent times.

Much as I sympathise with anyone who loses their job – for any reason other than they deserved the sack – having been in that situation myself, thankfully only briefly, my own view of the decision to pay former Woolworths staff taxpayers’ money is that it smacked of a Sir Dick from the Docks moment.

That is not to criticise former Senator Dick Shenton because his was a type of political representation which not only frequently demonstrated his willingness to let his heart rule his head but also urged others sitting with him to do the same.

I and many others have argued over the years that no political assembly is ever properly representative – or indeed anything other than something akin to a clinical rubber stamp operated simply on logic – without those who walk to the beat of a different drum to the majority.

That means that there must always be room for people like Sir Dick, John de Carteret, Dick Buesnel, Gary Matthews, J J Le Marquand and Stuart Syvret (to name but a few that many of us bolshie little crapauds can recall), people capable of looking at issues from a different angle; but life does start to get a little difficult when the mavericks become the majority.

It looks to me as if that’s what happened when our elected representatives voted by 34 to nine to lob out almost £140,000 in notice payments to the Woolies staff who lost their jobs and then seek to claim it back from the folded company’s administrators.

I say seek to claim it back simply because it’s by no means certain that the States are going to be successful and, as many people have pointed out, it matters little whether they are or not because the precedent has been set and the floodgates, if not wide open, have certainly been left ajar. It’s a worrying thought.

Even more worrying, however, is the eventual disclosure – because for a while Prime Minister Terry Le Sueur apparently tried to avoid giving an answer – at the same sitting that handwritten notes taken by hired help head lad Bill Ogley at the time the Island’s police chief (no less) was being suspended from duty have been destroyed.

At the very least I would have thought that those involved in an interview as high-powered and potentially contentious as this would have at least had a tape recorder, never mind a video camera, running throughout, just to ensure that mistakes in transcribing were not made and nothing got lost in the translation.

I’m sorry if I sound a little harsh but this is the sort of cock-up, ineptitude and disregard for what most of us would regard as fairly standard procedure in any case where disciplinary proceedings were a possibility – let alone the fact that this one involves Jersey’s most senior police officer – for which someone down the line in the pecking order would themselves have been disciplined and, in my view, asked to consider their position and quite possibly have been sacked.

In short, it is not something anyone would expect the most senior civil servant in the Island to do and quite frankly I’m amazed that Senator Le Sueur (a) appears to have been forced to admit that the notes had been binned, instead of immediately having been up front when first questioned, and (b) not announced that Mr Ogley had himself been suspended.

To paraphrase an extremely old joke, it seems to me that when our new Chief Minister was asked by Santa Claus what he wanted in his Christmas stocking, he got the top two on his list, a cowboy outfit and a Mickey Mouse set.

All that, added to the mounting public concern about evidence given at the recent manslaughter trial which followed the death of a nurse after surgery, does not make for a confidence-inspiring start to this Council of Ministers’ term of office.

Regrettably, but in the light of questions about the integrity and competence of some extremely well-paid public employees, promises and assurances by politicians, however fulsome they may be and however much time I’ve hitherto had for the individuals concerned, are beginning to leave me stone cold.

I said in the opening lines of this column that the States sitting to which I refer had the potential to prove one of the most expensive there’s been in recent times and I don’t mean just financially, although once the bills start coming in for inquiries, reviews and litigation I fear it’s going to cost us a few bob.

No, what I was really referring to was the potential cost to our autonomy and independence. At present, the Privy Councillor with particular responsibility for the Crown Dependencies is Lord Chancellor Jack Straw.
As this simple country boy understands it, that ‘particular responsibility’ centres primarily on the need to ensure good governance by the insular authorities.

I have started to wonder just how much more it will take – following the total fiasco of the Haut de la Garenne affair and everything else that’s happened in the ensuing 12 months – for Mr Straw to do what he did when he was Home Secretary and send over a former Whitehall mandarin to rattle a few cages and, horror of horrors, perhaps recommend that Hampshire should be enlarged by about 45 square miles.

And finally . . . I’m pleased to note that one lucky garage customer managed to ‘save’ £12,000 on a 2008 car. What we had to work out for ourselves was that the original cost was £40,000 and the price paid was £28,000. To answer the salesman’s question – not what I’d call cheap.