Survival advice for public sector workers

There should be a short booklet with a list of points for those about to take up public sector appointments — not the formal rules, which already exist, but certain informal tips for survival. One would be ‘Do not own — or at least visit in the winter — any house in a hot place abroad.’

The case of Sir Philip Dilley, the chairman of the Environment Agency, is in point. No doubt it would not have made the slightest practical difference if he had been around after Christmas to come and peer sympathetically at the victims of Cumbrian floods, but the idea that he was thousands of miles away — warm, rich, suntanned and wet only when he jumped into the Caribbean or his pool — was intolerable.

Jim Callaghan, as prime minister, made the same sort of mistake by going to an economic summit in Guadeloupe during the Winter of Discontent in January 1979.