IS there a bunker deep underneath Cyril Le Marquand House? A subterranean hideout from which ministerial edicts can be broadcast in times of crisis? A well-stocked fortified lair for the Council of Ministers to flee to, having tearfully kissed their loved ones goodbye?

If there isn’t one, they should look into it. If there is, it might be time to dust it out and check the dates on those tins of baked beans.

It takes a bit to get me – or anyone, really – to feel sorry for the Council of Ministers, but that twinge on Friday afternoon wasn’t lower back pain, it was … sympathy.

Not the immediate ‘Wow, tough break’ kind of sympathy, or even the wistful sympathy you feel for Stoke City football fans, lost animals or people from Guernsey. More a kind of general feeling that it must be very little fun for them right now.

To the left of them, there are teachers marching through town in protest over pay and conditions, preparing to ballot on strike action and talking tough on a deal that manual workers and civil servants accepted weeks ago.

To the right, there is a Public Accounts Committee demanding that they speed up spending cuts that no-one really thinks that they can make in the first place, and a chairman talking about cutting their pay.

And that’s not all. Right in their midst, there are departments which have failed to even figure out how they can make the first, and softest, round of cuts by the deadline. And ministers who told colleagues last week that they want more money next year, not less.

But in tough times, you look to your friends and colleagues for help. So it must have been a little upsetting to get to the States last week and find out that the rest of Jersey’s politicians just want to ask a billion questions about suspended police chief Graham Power, waste time on a total no-hoper proposition about putting number plates on bikes, and try to squeeze just one more debate out of the new incinerator.

And then to read the Waterfront Enterprise Board’s annual report and find that the big cheese is on £287,000 a year – that’s the kind of news that really helps when you’re committing yourself to the most dramatic public sector cuts in Jersey’s history.

There is a temptation to say that if you’re taking flak from the left and the right then you must be roughly in the middle, but it’s a bit of a short-cut to thinking. It’s unlikely that either the teachers’ unions or the Public Accounts Committee are going to score a big result over the next few months, but what has to be slightly more concerning for the Council of Ministers about the cuts effort is the fact that in some quarters, there doesn’t seem to be any effort at all.

Education Minister James Reed and Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand were already on the record saying that they didn’t fancy the idea of applying pro-rata cuts across their budgets, so it wasn’t a massive surprise that they were on the list of departments that didn’t make the deadline. Apparently, non-ministerial departments, the States Assembly budget and – in a special bonus for irony fans – the resources section at the Treasury department were the others.

Bear in mind that that’s not the deadline for making the cuts – it’s the deadline for figuring out where the cuts might be. And bear in mind also that the first round of cuts is just 2% – the next slices are 3% and 5%.

Now consider that the final debate on all this comes a year before an election, and that the next set will be biting as Islanders go to the polls in 2011.

And there’s the thing: there is no subject like public sector cuts to set a battle on straight ideological lines.

Those on the right will say, with some justification, that spending is out of control, that these cuts are nothing that the private sector couldn’t and doesn’t do as a matter of course, and that it’s better to cut than raise taxes.

And those on the left will say, with some justification, that there’s a universe of difference between running a profit-making company and delivering a public service, that investment in public services can yield rewards and returns, and that cuts now will lead to deeper problems later on.

And yet, and yet. Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf is playing this just right. Most departments have put in their cut proposals despite the tough targets and timetables, and to those who haven’t he has adopted a conciliatory tone (in public, at least).

Leaving aside entirely the ideological question of whether he’s right or wrong on the cuts, he won’t be afraid to take unpopular decisions if he really believes in them – and that’s high praise for a politician of any shade of opinion.

But his biggest problem isn’t strategy or tactics in the battle ahead. It’s figuring out which side his ministerial colleagues are on.