Does anyone actually resign anymore? Nowadays a resignation is regarded not as a final act but as a temporary career break and that’s bad for business.
Paul Gray – the former head of HM Revenue and Customs who ‘resigned’ two weeks ago after someone in his department posted the names, addresses and bank details of millions of citizens to another bureaucrat and it never arrived – has ‘returned to work for the government’, according to a Channel 4 News and The Guardian . The mandarin who fell on his sword has miraculously bounced off it again and into a £200,000-a-year post in the Cabinet Office, where he is said to be involved in a project ‘to develop civil servants’ skills’. Like how to write “Confidential Personal Data, Extremely Valuable to Fraudsters: Try Not To Lose This Time” on big brown envelopes. Or for the advanced course: how to pretend to do the honourable thing to help your ministerial boss out of a tight corner, and make sure you come out OK.
This is, no doubt, all about Mr Gray’s pension entitlements: sixty next August, with 38 years’ blameless service in a succession of the dullest Whitehall posts it is possible to imagine, he clearly wasn’t going to walk the plank without a safety net.
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