pumpkinstrokemarrow

In some cases it is fairly straightforward. So judge X decides that felon Y is guilty as charged and shall be hung by the neck until dead on Z. At least in this country, when we used to do such things, we used to get on with it, and Y was hung on Z.

At the next level, a junior mandarin managing some project or other convinces a senior mandarin that it would be a good idea to spend some money. Senior mandarin is persuaded and the minute of the meeting duly records that project X is authorised to spend Y on Z. The trick, if one is the junior mandarin, is to get Y to be as big as possible and to get Z to be as vague as possible. Don't want anything specific like '25 new servers make IBM, model ABC' or 'against shopping list A appended'. A blank cheque is much better. Then you can get on and deal with the inevitable contingencies as they arise without having to explain one self all over again. Particularly when the expensive pickle is of one's own baking.

And then there is the question of enforcement. I am reminded of an anecdote about the chief engineer at Heathrow Airport. A fairly important sort of cove it seems, at least a knight in conqueror speak. The less important cove that I knew was a wow on neural networks, at the time a fashionable species of computer software. He persuaded the chief engineer at some meeting that if all the considerable amount of equipment at Heathrow was tooled up with sensors and connected to his neural network, huge amounts of money and down-time would be saved by improved targeting of preventative maintenance, neural networks being good at detecting changes of behaviour and changes of behaviour usually being a bad thing in this context. So the chief engineer said "make it so". But was there any enforcement? Did he have a team of aides that followed such things up, or was this decision just lost in the mists of time when my cove lost interest and moved on?

But Ministers of the Crown do have teams of aides. So when they have a bee in their bonnet, or one of their aides has a bee in his or her bonnet, a whole bureaucratic machine is put into place. Each period, anybody with any interest in this particular bee has to report progress against myriad targets. The asking often being done in rather grand letters purporting to be exchanged between Ministers, or sometimes in even grander letters headed '10 Downing Street'. These reports are usually inspected by several layers of bureaucracy, with each layer needing to demonstrate how much value they have added. One sometimes got the impression that reporting was burning up far more time and energy than getting the bee out of the bonnet.

I recall that one such bee resulted in all department acquiring large buying departments (remember Bristow of the old Evening Standard?), departments which had mutated into highly paid commercial departments by the time I packed up. It was not altogether clear that buying decisions were that much better than they were in the bad old days - but at least there was a process to be inspected. And where there is a process, there is usually a buck to be passed.