HERE’S a question: if someone told you to go and top yourself, then gave you £3m –would you, on balance, feel good or bad about it?

It’s a tricky one, I know, so you don’t have to answer straight away. Have a think about it, mull it over and we’ll come back to it.

So, we’re not even six months into the new Council of Ministers and they’re already one down.

Senator Jim Perchard’s departure was a strange and muddled one – but there’s no doubt that support for him had started dropping off dramatically.

His boss, Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur, went from giving him his full support, to saying that he considered the swearing in the States incident ‘closed’, to offering a glowing reference when the former Health Minister quit, to putting up someone else for the job.

Oddly, he kept losing support on the day of the election as well – polling 11 votes in the first round, and ten in the second. Weird.

Congratulations and good luck to his replacement, Trinity Deputy Anne Pryke, who now has £150m to play with every year and a whole load of new problems. Her appointment also means that the Council of Ministers isn’t a men-only affair – and that is to be welcomed.

But the thing that really stands out from the resignation/dismissal/replacement of Senator Perchard is that the bar has been raised.

This States Chamber expects more from its ministers than the last one, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

And it raises a difficult question for Senator Le Sueur: namely the one in the first paragraph.

However bad, ill-judged and thoroughly inappropriate the comments of the former Health Minister were, surely, surely, it’s worse to lose £3m (potentially rising to £9m) by cocking up the incinerator contract in the face of a clear promise to Members to fix exchange rates on the day the £100m-plus incinerator deal was signed.

The Public Accounts Committee hearing a fortnight ago painted a picture of – and here I quote no less a source than the JEP itself – of a ‘failing system characterised by confusion, a lack of clarity about who was responsible for what, conflicting advice and a failure to make decisions’.

Well, that’s not the picture we’re used to getting of the Treasury Department, and it doesn’t square with the ‘safe pair of hands’ spiel that Senator Le Sueur based his successful run for Chief Minister on.

The current Treasury Minister, Senator Philip Ozouf, cannot be faulted for his handling of the problem.

The mistakes were made before he got the job, and as soon as the mess went public he requested an independent report and instigated disciplinary action as soon as that report was published.

But the disciplinary action is unlikely to dig Senator Le Sueur out of trouble because the results are almost always confidential.

Having raised the bar for ministers, the Senator might need a little help getting over it himself in the coming months.

STATES Members sometimes appear to believe, each and every individual one of them, that they have an absolute monopoly on common sense and honesty, that they’re the only ones who really understand the public, that they are the only ones who know how the economy works, that they’re the only ones with a conscience and that they are the only ones who have ever done a solid day’s work. Put simply, they take themselves pretty seriously.

Self-deprecating humour, therefore, is in pretty short supply. For that reason, my favourite moment of last week – and possibly the whole year – was Deputy Paul Le Claire’s response to polling one single vote (his, presumably) in the election for Health Minister.

‘I would just like to thank all the Members who voted for me, sir. I know I have their confidence,’ he said. Brilliant. Fair play to him.

Congratulations also to Deputy Bob Hill – one of the few masters of the ‘backbencher proposition’.

It’s not every sitting that a Member outside the executive wins a vote in the House, and although the extension of Question Time by 30 minutes is something that your humble correspondent will end up cursing during some future dreary States sitting, it’s important.

The vast majority of States questions are: a) rubbish, b) insignificant and c) a shallow attempt to make a row out of nothing.

But sometimes, every now and then, they can be genuinely illuminating and put the politicians who run the Island on the spot. And that’s always fun.