OLDER readers may well recall seeing the by-line above articles in this newspaper of one ‘WJ Job’ – Wilfred James Job, known to all who came into contact with him as Jimmy Job – who until his retirement on the day the EP moved from Bath Street to Five Oaks was the editorial department’s chief reporter.

Without putting too fine a point on it, Jimmy was renowned for a number of things, not least the often dismissive comments he was wont to make when appropriate circumstances arose.

Someone once fainted seconds before Jimmy walked in to the reporters’ office, but he simply walked over the prone being, remarking as he did so that while with the Eighth Army in North Africa – the tales he told about him and Monty were something else – he had seen ‘scores of them dropping like flies’ and therefore the incident was not really that remarkable.

Another of his favourites – voiced particularly when a young reporter had been praised by the powers that ruled the roost in those days – was that he had ‘seen them all come and seen them all go’.

Invariably, just to bring the blushing-with-pride junior down to earth, they would be sent by Jimmy to cover afternoon sessions of whichever of the courts was likely to sit the latest – no swift halves at the Red Lamp (of blessed memory) around the corner for them as soon as the paper was published.

The recollection of the ‘seen them all come…’ comment crystallised for me last week when the latest in the long list of UK parliamentary busybodies poked his nose into affairs which quite frankly are no more of his business than they were of his predecessors.

This one was born William Wallace who, as far as I can make out, made so many unsuccessful attempts at getting elected to the House of Commons – there were five in all, flitting between Yorkshire and Lancashire between 1970 and 1987 – that in 1995 John Major took pity on him and recommended that he be given a life peerage.

That meant that after a quarter of a century of trying, he finally entered Parliament through the back door, as it were, as Lord Wallace of Saltaire.

He has recently visited Guernsey (I’d better not say the colonies in case his lordship takes it seriously and starts prattling on in the House of Lords that Jersey is colonising neighbouring jurisdictions) and while there rattled a few cages by telling them that full independence for these small rocks could lead to that lot in the Big House ‘falling prey to corruption’.

What – like Members of the House of Lords getting paid to raise matters in debate, Members of the Commons taking money (or Harrods vouchers) to ask questions, and a great wedge of all of them either fiddling their expenses or pulling down hundreds of pounds a week for doing little more than walk passed the front door? Heaven forbid and perish the very thought.

Just because people closer to his home are at it, as – he suggests, for I know little of these weighty matters – are some politicians in the Caribbean, it doesn’t mean to say that those in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man should be tarred with the same brush.

In addition, and probably a more serious worry, he said that the 800-year-old understanding that the UK would always respect the islands’ right to self government was no longer appropriate. He was quoted as saying: ‘You cannot say that a promise given 800 years ago in totally different circumstances fits in any part today.’

Well, is that so pal – sorry, your lordship? And there’s us stupid little crapauds all believing what we’d been taught as children – that if you break promises then your soul will be immediately blackened and when you die you’ll go straight to Hell.
The same standards clearly don’t seem to apply to peers of the realm, although I think there may well be a hidden agenda with George (sorry, Lord) Foulkes’s new best friend, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.

In March of this year Lord Wallace admitted to his fellow noble lords that he had first raised the issue of tax avoidance or evasion in 1999. As a result, what he described as senior officials from Jersey went to see him to explain that the Island had been a low-tax jurisdiction since 1204. But I checked, said Lord Wallace, and found that there was no reliable record.

It seems to me that something got lost in the translation here, because I’ve never heard 1204 associated with anything but these islands having chosen to stick with the English Crown and King John rather than chance their arm with the French – a nation pretty good at making calvados but, it has to be said, not so hot when it comes to war if the experiences of the 20th century are anything to go by.

However, his lordship later told his fellow peers that he gets information from Tax Justice Network – ‘an immensely valuable source’ was how he described it – a statement which probably says it all, really.

I think the French are using him to get these islands back as part of Normandy. After all, in 2005 Lord Wallace was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, and that award followed Lady Wallace being appointed as a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite, and the pair of them have got to earn their keep, haven’t they?
There’s no other sensible explanation.

AND finally … I see the shabby veil of silence over what has really happened in respect of the multi-million-pound currency débâcle shows no sign of lifting, or indeed being lifted.

I always thought that our elected representatives had the power to appoint a committee of inquiry, which itself was empowered to call witnesses on oath with a failure to co-operate rendering them liable to criminal prosecution.
Whose got the bottle to propose that, then?