WHEN I wrote recently that the new managing director at Health probably had a salary to match how important his title sounded, I never reckoned that his particular gravy train was coming into the Gloucester Street station at a more than healthy (if you’ll excuse the pun) £216,000 a year.

Before I go any further, can I make it clear that whatever I say is not a criticism of Health managing director Andrew McLaughlin. If he can persuade those who hold the purse strings that he’s worth over a grand for every day he sets foot in the office, then I have nothing but admiration for him.

Indeed, it might be as well to give him a weekend job and put him in charge of all the investment funds (the old-age pension and public employee pension funds are two which spring to mind), because anyone who can increase what comes in the little brown envelope every Friday lunchtime from a reported salary of between £110,000 and £140,000 a year to the package admitted in the Big House last week by Nurse Pryke must not only have all his marbles, but must also be in the fortunate position of having them in the right order.

Mr McLaughlin certainly has a clearer grasp of his good fortune than the Health Minister, who initially told the States (but only after persistent questioning from her fellow former nurse, Deputy Angela Jeune) that the contract was worth £312,000, only to revise to an almost equally stomach-turning £216,000 after someone provided her with a calculator.

It’s all well and good for Anne Pryke to seek to defend such a pay packet by glibly saying that the managing director has already saved at least £600,000 so far. That, in case she is unaware of what senior managers are meant to do, is precisely what they are paid to do, among other things. If that criteria is adopted to the point of silliness, you might just as well say that a paramedic whose skill and
experience save lives, or a police officer who chances upon a
serious assault and stops it before someone dies, are also worth a lot more than (in terms relative to the salary we are discussing) the pittance they actually receive.

As to her assertion that the civil servant in question pays his travel and hotel accommodation expenses, that, I’m afraid, appears to me to be his choice. If I lived elsewhere and got a job working for that lot in the Big House, I wouldn’t expect them to pay my rent and the cost of getting to and from my place of work, so why should Mr McLaughlin’s circumstances – and particularly the fact that he chooses not to set up home in the Island – make him any different from, let’s say, the paramedic and police officer to whom I referred earlier, and indeed the nurses who work in the same building?

The criteria to which the Health Minister alluded seems from my seat in The Shed to be akin to the hugely discredited bonus culture without which, we are told, we (for ‘we’ read that lot in the Big House) cannot recruit the calibre of people necessary to run things here.

It is an abhorrence which does nothing but cause resentment, envy and, as a result, division among the lower-paid oppressed in the workplace, and the sooner it is abolished and replaced with straightforward salaries on scales commensurate with job descriptions, the better.

THE news that a Swiss bank has issued clear rules on the way its staff members dress (and covering also what they eat) may well have been received with derision in some quarters, but for those of my generation – and hopefully some of other generations also – it was welcome news indeed.

I can well remember a conversation with Sir Dick from the Docks when he told me how he had criticised a relatively senior civil servant from one of the many States departments which came under the then Senator’s control during his long political career, who turned up for a meeting of the committee after a lunch that had clearly involved garlic.

As he told me at the time, it would not have been acceptable for him to come to the meeting smelling of beer after having a pint or two at lunchtime, so why should he come in smelling of anything else?

Reflecting on that over a glass of calvados (the only person who raises an eyebrow about that is Herself, and she is usually more concerned about quantities than the appley smell of the stuff), it’s probably a minor miracle that it wasn’t a manual worker, because the wrath of one Lord Liron of Fauvic and St Malo might well have descended in all its fury. But I digress.

Having read last week’s article in full, I have to say that I raised just a glimmer of a smile when I came to the bit about the dress code for the States police when the officer stated: ‘We have a policy to ensure that all members of the States of Jersey police present a professional image of the force to members of the public.’

While I don’t for a moment suggest that that they present anything other than a professional image of the force, I cannot help but state the concern I felt when I saw a picture in this newspaper a while ago of an officer dressed all in black with his trousers tucked into leather boots that almost reached his knees.

As I recall it, the picture was taken when an area around Charing Cross was evacuated, for some reason or another. It might well have presented a professional image which satisfied the force’s rules, but it wasn’t the sort of image people usually associate with the police in Jersey. I certainly didn’t like it.

AND finally … letter writer Brian de Ste Croix’s claim that Deputy Sean Power’s ministerial demise was caused because of ‘a relatively minor infraction of the Data Protection Law’ and his independence of mind not sitting comfortably with the Council of Ministers is wide of the mark. Deputy Power lost his job because he forwarded a sensitive and highly personal email which had nothing to do with him to a third party.