I KNOW that it was published a couple of weeks ago but what with trying to play a polite host to Herself’s tribe over the holiday – my prayers about snow and all that forcing a cancellation of their flight were sadly not answered – I’ve only just managed to read the interview with David Warcup.

Little in it surprised me and I’ve already made my views known on why it’s sad he felt unable to take up the post of Police Chief and even sadder that one of the reasons was criticism from some of that lot in the Big House.

Again, that criticism was probably about par for the course. Politicians in Jersey got rid of their first police chief almost 45 years ago and according to a mate of mine who follows affairs in and around the Kremlin, scarcely a year goes by without one or more of them thinking he or she knows better than those paid to be running the show.

I doubt that an all singing, all dancing police authority is going to make a scrap of difference because its members will be appointed by the very politicians who’ll want to keep sticking their noses where they don’t belong. And if history is anything to go by, and it invariably is, those meddling politicians are likely to be aided and abetted by some mischief making from within the force also.

All that said, I wish Mr Warcup and his family well and am sorry things didn’t work out for them here. However, I wish I had his optimism in relation to one of the things he said in his final interview – working to introduce an improved system of succession planning and leadership training.

If I had a bottle of Calvados for every time I’d heard of someone from elsewhere saying it – or the equally familiar ‘an important part of my role is/has been to identify and train up a successor’ – I’d be permanently legless.

They all say it but how many of them have ever done it, and I’m not only talking about the police force but other States departments also. The public sector, in relation to its upper echelons, is a self-perpetuating gravy train run by those it benefits most, aided and abetted by weak politicians who have either lost the will to trust the judgment they exercised quite ruthlessly when in business, or simply haven’t got the guts to stand up to civil servants.

What we need here is a bit less of the ‘it’s only their money we’re spending’ philosophy that is only just being stamped on in England (which explains why they all want to work here) and a lot more of the parsimonious Jerseyman’s philosophy which, broadly speaking, amounts to treating taxpayers’ money as carefully as if it was his own. As they say, when it comes to money, a crapaud is a Scot stripped of his generosity.

IT seems from my comfortable seat in The Shed that the Minister for Economic Development is playing school milk politics with his ‘the lifeguard service is under review’ bombshell disclosure the other day. I wouldn’t know Alan Maclean if I fell over him but as someone who has voted in about a couple of dozen elections I will presume to give him a little bit of advice: don’t pull stunts like this because your credibility will evaporate as quickly as your votes and the post-war history of Jersey politics is littered with examples.

Panicking people into accepting the lesser of two evils – as I strongly suspect you are about to do when you make public the ‘or’ bit of the ‘lifeguards or…’ policy – will get you absolutely nowhere. Indeed, if you are serious about making cuts then perhaps you should take a leaf out of Guernsey’s book, where they asked the rank and file members of the public sector workforce where they’d set about pruning.

The Guernsey lot identified consultants as being the biggest waste of money, saying that all the issues they raised could have been obtained better and cheaper by asking current members of the workforce.

I have no doubt at all that a similar exercise over here would produce not only similar results – and consequent savings of millions in the process, given what’s been poured down too many drains for decades –but would also identify the managerial/supervisory/administrative jobs which really are very much surplus to requirements. There’s not much that those at the coal face don’t spot and they are usually the ones who care most – about both their working environment and their Island.

On a similar topic, I note that those at the coal face of the Jersey Museum and the Jersey Maritime Museum are the ones to lose out because of the potentially disastrous (in PR terms almost on a par with that at the Zoo) closure of both these popular attractions. However, surprise, surprise, the administrative staff will keep their jobs.

You bet your bottom dollar they will – they always do. I know I’m only a simple country boy but if the shops are shut and the staff have been sent home, can someone please tell me what there is left to administer?

If anyone out there has a list of all the staff employed by the Heritage Trust – I don’t want names, just the job titles will do – then I’d love to see it because when I think back to how the original museum and La Hougue Bie used to be run then even allowing for whatever’s been added to the portfolio, there seem to be an awful lot more chiefs than there were before.

Pop the list in a brown envelope with my name on the front and mum’s the word.

And finally … the aforementioned Alan Maclean says had it not been for fiscal stimulus – messing about with Victoria Avenue – there would have been more than 1,310 people unemployed this Christmas. So that makes it alright, does it? Where’s your winter work scheme, minister?