SOME years ago a senior civil servant I met at a gathering of some sort or another bent my ear, without knowing who he was talking to and until Herself took pity and rescued me, about how the contents of this column exposed the Island, its government and – as he put it – its administrative support to ridicule.

Sadly, this particular pinstripe must have been standing behind a big bloke when sense of humour was being dished out for he was seriously lacking in that department. Indeed, so much so that when I observed in response that neither our elected representatives nor their increasingly expensive hired help needed any assistance from anyone in exposing Jersey to ridicule on occasions, he looked at me as if I’d committed heresy.

Fortunately, it was at this juncture that Herself intervened and led me away – to the bar, as I recall, but no matter – thus sparing me from listening to episode two of whatever he was wittering on about before he started blaming the author of this column for all the world’s ills.

All that sprang to mind when I read how Airport director Julian Green (by name and by nature by the looks of things) seemingly entered into preliminary negotiations with this 17-year-old who professed to be the UK-based agent for American Global Group and wanted to set up an ambitious network of flights between here, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Unfortunately, as the world and his brother now knows – almost literally, what with at least one major American news channel and heaven knows how many national and international news networks running the story – the airline this lad claimed to represent did not exist and nor did the fleet of a dozen jets to which he professed to have immediate access.

Nevertheless, Mr Green entertained this lad in his office for an hour and a half and unless they were discussing the relative merits of Leeds United and the Sydney Swans (the 17-year-old is from Yorkshire and Mr Green was transferred to Jersey Airport from a similar establishment in Sydney, Australia) we have to assume that the bloke upon whom the economic viability of our Airport depends was taken in for at least 80 of those 90 minutes.

My own experiences – and they’ve been several where I’ve fallen for whatever was going hook, line and sinker – suggest that there’s only one course of action in such circumstances and that is to immediately put your hands up and admit that you were taken in.

And what does our Airport director do? Admits that he met the 17-year-old – given the circumstances he could hardly deny it – and then gets this mythical body called ‘the Airport authorities’, which sounds to me like spin doctors and nurses summonsed from town to the top of Beaumont Hill and beyond by someone with his hand glued firmly to the panic button, to issue a statement.

Absolutely deadpan, presumably while the world was laughing its whatsits off at us, this bunch said that although ‘Jersey Airport’ had had discussions with the youngster in recent weeks, further information had come to light in recent days and negotiations had ended. In other words, we were rumbled but we’re still not going to do the decent thing and put our hands up.

Then, to stretch our open-mouthed incredulity to the absolute limit, he told the JEP that no comment could be made on what was discussed between Mr Green and this 17-year-old Walter Mitty who, I am told, could have been exposed as such in minutes by a couple of searches on the internet, ‘because of commercial sensitivity’.

Say that again! Oh, don’t bother – I’ve just read it again. 

Here we have a 17-year-old who manages to pin down a senior civil servant for an hour and a half – a record in itself, I’d have thought, given that the difficulty people have in getting hold of some of them suggests that we came home with a bag full of gold medals from the hide and seek events at the recent Island Games – talking about a non-existent airline, non-existent aircraft and non-existent flights between here and the UK and Europe, and now we find that matters of ‘commercial sensitivity’ have been on the agenda.

Given that all the information provided by the lad was based on phantom airlines, aircraft and services, I think we are entitled to assume that whatever else he had to say was based either on fiction or what he gleaned from within the public domain, which in turn suggests that the only commercially sensitive information discussed at the meeting must have been introduced and imparted by Mr Green himself.

If this is the case, how very indiscreet of him. As those, like me, who have inhabited the lower rungs of the job pecking order ladder will know perfectly well, such indiscretions, if proven, lead almost inevitably to that strip of green carpet in front of the boss’s desk, from behind which is dispensed summary justice and in many cases instant dismissal.

As for this bloke, he’ll probably get the same sort of justice enjoyed by fellow pinstripes such as the one who didn’t think it important to keep the hand-written notes he made when the chief officer of the States Police was suspended from duty.

That little episode has gone about as quiet as the massive currency cock-up over the new incinerator. Compared with the rest of us, these blokes lead charmed lives, don’t they?

And finally, I can’t make up my mind whether Uri Geller’s sister just likes to see her picture and name in the paper or whether she really has some serious information to impart in her role as Medical Officer of Health but if she really wants to put the fear of death up everyone – quite literally – she’s going the right way about it.