This year I watched the short hour length Oscar show, preceded by half an hour of introductions and red carpet interviews from the British viewpoint, and which underlined that apart from individual shows, the Oscars is regarded as the make or break fashion event of the year. The British perspective, for those who appear to be more interested in who is wearing what, was presented by the gorgeous and empathetic Kate Thornton who came to the fore, first with the pre and post competition shows of British Idol and then moved onto becoming the main show presenter. I felt I had contributed to her rise to fame by sending one of my appreciative emails to her management. She then disappeared from within the range of my periscope and then within the last month she was doing the red carpet outside the Baftas and the Oscars.
I mention this because it emphasises that once you get your break you have to give yourself wholeheartedly and without reservation to whatever it is you wish to succeed at and this usually involves being accepted and appreciated by the tribe of interest. My own experience centred on the child care social work tribe in the middle to late 1960's when I was taken up by one and then other influential and well connected individuals, thrust onto the activity stage, took full use of the opportunities and soon became known, developed a constituency and then found myself in a world where your accumulating record became your entry into more and more spheres of activity and influence. I then dropped out of this scene in order to learn and survive in the new world of social services management which was created during a period of five years when there was open and covert warfare over the future of social work, the personal social services, the health services and social security provisions in the UK, and reorganisations of local government, first in greater London and then throughout the whole of the UK.
While there was at times heated disagreement about the structure of Local Government, the National Health Service and the Social Security Services, there was general acceptance that there should be a national government run universal system for the provision of financial support to families and individuals divided between entitlements applicable to everyone, such as state pensions from the age of 60 for females and 65 for males and child benefit allowance for the first and subsequent children irrespective of financial circumstances, together with a range of financial supports based on individual assessments but where there was national policy, payment criteria and processes, which meant that you followed the same procedures and were assessed and awarded the same amounts wherever you lived with the consequence of fair system for everyone
This was also broadly the same approach in relation to the National Health Hospital Service which was divided between medical consultants and administrators, with nursing doing the work but having little say on policy and organisation, and where forty years later and twenty and more management restructurings and attempts change the balance of interests and power between doctors, nurses and the organisation and management of computer programmes, everyone from Prime Minister to ward cleaner has not worked out what works and what does not, despite the growth in people employed, and in other resources, and despite improvement is many aspects of heath care. The arguments about organisation and management continue, and between a public funded and the private service and on the mixture of the two.
In social work the dilemma was whether to bring all the different public funded social casework work services, there were eight, into one professional and management system, or leave this to be decided by the local authorities with responsibilities for the majority, but where probation and prison work was part of the judicial system where it remains in England and Wales and within hospitals and other health services, which was subsequently brought under social services, and where there were also those who functioned within the charitable and non statutory section, provided by religious based bodies, and a plethora of individual bodies, some international, while others restricted to an area and sometimes employing one individual with a committee.
The decision was to bring everyone, exception probation and prison after care, in England and Wales into one training system and to call everyone a social worker, and leave it to employing bodies whether they continued to specialise in their chosen interest, or commenced to become Jack's and Jill's of social work practice as they were being trained to do. The problem was that a bloody war, in terms of job power and survival developed within the health services which led to the abolition of Medical Officers of Health and their powerful role within local government and to the abolition of the Hospital Administrator, subsequently, from which the Chief Executive was created, as someone with generic management skills and increasingly a capitalist commercial background, and which for a period of two years led to an unsuccessful attempt by local authority medical officers trying to hijack the local authority social services, including those of social work, and an equally bloody power and position battle between Children's Officers and Adult Welfare Service Managers where those behind the proposed creation of a combined social services and social work department within local government assumed the increasingly professionally qualified but small Child Care Service would predominate over the largely unqualified, except in the fields of mental health, but administratively larger, adult welfare service, when what happened was the effective and immediate destruction of the qualified and specialist child care service within local government.
The abolition of the Local authority Medical Officer of Health was a profound mistake and nothing will shake my belief that although you need to have a Chief Executive who is administratively and managerial competent and capable of operating in a business like way, he should be first and foremost a medical man or woman. You do have the best legal firms in the world run by people who did not train and practice as lawyers.
I had played a key, a pivotal role in preventing the take over by health of social work, not because it was a bad thing in principle, but because Medical Officers of Health and their employers were doing it for the worst of possible reasons, and had no idea about the nature and need for social casework, especially in relation to children and in the field of Mental Health. There were eight or nine different variations of reorganisations within local authority social services at the time and those of us directly involved in influencing and advising government were warned that unless this situation was stopped in its tracks it would be impossible to persuade parliament to introduce one system for England and Wales. I was put in charge of a committee to do that and within months we did.
However I was then frozen out from being directly involved in the subsequently battles for the nature of social work training and the organisation of social services within the local government structure because of my stated opposition to the formation of one social work organisation and to generic social work practice.. I was one of three votes cast against the abolition of the child care body and its absorption within the British Association (similar to those who see Britain being better outside of Europe unless it is able to maintain control over some fundamental aspects of Britishness). There were those who thought I was just peeved because it meant I would not move from Vice President to President, although I was to become the first chairman of the Family and Child Care section within BASW, whereas I could foresee this was no more than a step towards the deplorable and disastrous loss of skill and expertise and which it then took three decades of child deaths and child abuse within the new care system before government and the local authorities realised there was no alternative but to go back to having two structures, one for children under or allied to the education service, and one for adult social services allied to health.
There was another reason why I quickly dropped out of national involvements, I had to learn all about the services for adults, their needs and wishes, the professional policies and procedures, including the legislation. On day I was involved only in child care and the very next with services for the elderly, the disabled and those with mental health issues and where I had no training or previous experience, thus it was so for everyone, but with the difference that I held a management post with responsibility for devising the working arrangements to implement national policies as agreed and interpreted by my local authority employers, and at a time when my job, as with all jobs in England and Wales outside of London was to be abolished in three years with the creation of a new Local Government and Health management system, and where the local government and health systems were not to be coterminous.
What most of the general public did not understand, and I suspect together with many of those in Parliament without a knowledge of how local government works in practice, is that even if you have legislation introducing one pattern of services or one policy covering all local government provision of a service, the practice will vary between types of local authority structure and between authorities within the different types of authority. Indeed it was evident that within social services there were departments where thee was little or no change in how things were organised or in the levels and quality of services between 1971 and 1974 and I also got to know of situations where this was largely the situation two decades later, despite the changes in titles and defined written roles. This was not a surprise to me as I had previously joined one the biggest children's department in the UK where things had not changed for the better for two decades and some appalling care and practices had been allowed to develop.
It took me a decade to sort myself out in the new situation before I decided to accept invitations to participate in national activities and matters of national influence, and then restricted to a subject which I had come to know something about through personal experience and study. Then just as I had become confident and useful I learnt of proposals to change the Child Care and Adult Services in a fundamental way again and to do so in manner which would replicate the chaos and mismanagement of thirties year before. Although I attempted to respond to the national policy challenge and personal occupation challenge, combining my previous experience with that gained subsequently, I failed, in part through my own fault, although only a further decade was to pass before others decided that I had been right in the late sixties and early seventies as well as in the late eighties and early 1990's and commenced to make the essential changes. During those years I had learnt one important fact about myself and the system. It is easier to have an influence if you separate presenting and achieving the idea from oneself. If the objective is to stop something bad happening or change something for the better then personal gain and recognition should always be secondary and in most instances unnecessary and undesirable. Get others to do what you cannot do yourself.
This is not so for the stage and film actor and the makers if theatricals and films. Once you have made it you have to keep yourself at the forefront of attention within the profession and in the public eye, such is the competition and the difficulty achieving a comeback. It can be done, but it is wise not to take the risk, unless you are confident in what else you decide to do. These thoughts came to mind as I watched with frustration while one third of the Oscar's programme was devoted to the red carpet.
For the first time in several years I failed to see the films where the critics suggested film and acting performance could put them in the running, and even the announcement of nomination did not drive me immediately into the cinema, although I hold a fist of free seat vouchers. I plan to remedy from today or tomorrow. I also did not watch or listen to any news bulletins or magazine type programmes during Monday so that there would that mixture of emotions as the awards were announced. The Cohen Brothers received three Oscars on the night (to add to their previous one), for the best film, best direction and best adapted screen play from a published work. No country for Old men also resulted in an Oscar for Javier Barden as supporting actor, who together with Daniel Day Lewis and Marion Cotillard transformed themselves beyond facial recognition in their respective roles. Admittedly Day Lewis looks like his character from Gangs of New York and I was surprised that the film did not sneak in as best film given the praise from Mark Kermode although he does advocate seeing the film several times and being able to move around during the three hours of the film which I hope to see tomorrow. I was also interested by his comments about Juno to add the film to my list for which Diablo Cody received the award for original screen play.
Michael Clayton did rather well with Tilda Swinton replicating her Bafta for supporting actress and much nominated Atonement received one award for Music, while the Bourne Ultimatum got three in the area of sound and its editing, and for film editing. The importance of the Oscars in the world of world film box office is such that everyone nominated attends and everyone receiving a high profile award last year hands over awards to this year. Your future career depends on it.
Before the Oscar ceremony there was time to see the first 90 minutes of the original Howard Hawkes 1946 bringing to the screen of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, a film declared culturally, historically and aesthetically significant in 1997 to become part of the National Film Register. I have seen this film at least twice during the past decades, together with To have and Have not, made in 1944 which made her into a star when aged 19 having been a fashion model, and was drawn to the attention of Hawke's wife who showed him her photograph. She met three times married Humphrey Bogart on set and despite the restraints on and off the screen at that time, it is evident from their performance together, and subsequently in Dark Passage and Key Largo that this was to be the love of their lives. Two more films which I see again and again from time to time. The Hemingway novel based To have and have not has several echoes of the role which Bogart, (together with Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henried, Claude Raines, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) made into my at least once a year re-experience best film of all time, Casablanca. The Big Sleep has a complex plot which makes two viewings in quick succession to ensure one understands fully and some knowledge of the book is also helpful because a key issue in the film is blackmail over a pornographic photo, which has to be adjusted for what was allowed on screen, just as in the book Lauren's character strips naked and into Bogart's bed in order to bring him on side for her version of events, whereas in the film she is sitting dressed in his room in a chair. In the Michael Winner, Robert Mitcham version of the same film, the issues of pornography and homosexuality are raised openly, and there is nudity, but this adds nothing to the strength of the original production. Great is a generally misapplied expression, which I am as guilty of using as everyone else but great is what Humphrey Bogart was in all his work with Casablanca and the African Queen my two favourites. I came to see Lauren Bacall from her later work and it is only when viewing again those films made in her twenties does her young beauty combined with a worldly charisma hit you. She sings and swings a jazzy number in the film which emphasises her multi talent and it is easy to see why Bogart was swept off his feet and you can feel the enduring love when she speaks of him now in her eighties.
In contrast to the weightiness of the winning films of the Oscars and the Big Sleep, I have been enjoying reliving the first seven episodes of Yes Minister commenced in 1979 but held over until 1980 because of the election that year, There were only seven episodes in the three series of Yes Minister and 8 in each of the two series of Yes Prime Minister. I have the edited scripts in the form of dairies for the first series of both. There is not one programme which does not contain memorable insights and exchanges about the reality of politics, management, making change, making change work for the better. What amazes me is that even if Prime Ministers and would be Prime Ministers and Cabinet Minister do watch all thirty eight episodes before taking office, they do not appear to learn the lessons. In the opening episode as Jim Hacker comments on his first day at the Ministry of Administrative Affairs, a non existent government department and Cabinet post at the time, he writes of being warned by a colleague that the DA is political graveyard, along with the Home Office. On arrival finds everyone helpful, providing him with his ready made diary of meetings and visits and his boxes of papers requiring his personal attention. In reality a Cabinet Minister will have a team of Ministers and each will be supplied with background information papers on the department, its functions, its staff and its budget and the time table of ongoing commitments, the most important being Parliamentary Question Time, one of the Ministers will be a Member of the House of Lords, for the Department, and the Cabinet and its sub committees for the Cabinet Minister and a whole range of inter departmental committees and sub Committees for the other Ministers and where each activity will have an appropriate civil servant preparing or reviewing the Agenda papers, and preparing information and accompanying the Minister as appropriate. For each Committee or official meeting there would be internal briefing meetings attended by members of the Ministerial Team and Members of civil service at appropriate levels of seniority, although some of those involved will be quite young and comparatively inexperienced. There will also be official political advisers to balance the advice of officialdom. There are two types of Minister and senior Public servant. There are those who are interested in holding the office with its power, status and financial rewards and will fit into the system and carry out the political and managerial policies and practices determined by others, and those who see the position as the opportunity to pursue their political or managerial policies and practices and the best situation is where Chairman and Chief Executive, Minister and Chief Civil Servant, Local authority Chairman and Chief Officer each fall into one of the categories but not both. It does not matter in practice which role is performed by who, as long as the two roles are covered. If both are just interested in their position they are usually skilled in protecting themselves and therefore their department but from the public viewpoint this usually means that nothing will fundamentally change but everything will have the appearance of change and in stable times this can be a good thing, but hopeless in a crisis. If both want to do things and change things themselves then there is usually war and chaos and nothing gets dome and things go from bad to worse as they each concentrate on getting rid of the other. However if they at the same mind and outlook they can implement a revolution. Best therefore is a combination of the two.
I resist the temptation to work through the rest of the first episodes and the others as it would lead to my spending the rest of the day and week, and month, which is not bad idea, but will leave to those days when nothing come immediately to mind. I will also leave until later in the week, commenting about the horror story emerging from the Island of Jersey with the discovery of the remains of a former child in care following complaints about what happened some fifty years ago, and the announcement that other body finds will be expected. Today a former Minister says he will provide information about an earlier cover up. I am an expert on the way things can be covered up for good and for bad reasons, and the Yes Minister and Prime Minister series and books also explains the reality. Hollywood has also been very good at revealing the truth, although all this knowledge has no affect on those engaged in the covering up except to persuade them to become better at it.
I mention this because it emphasises that once you get your break you have to give yourself wholeheartedly and without reservation to whatever it is you wish to succeed at and this usually involves being accepted and appreciated by the tribe of interest. My own experience centred on the child care social work tribe in the middle to late 1960's when I was taken up by one and then other influential and well connected individuals, thrust onto the activity stage, took full use of the opportunities and soon became known, developed a constituency and then found myself in a world where your accumulating record became your entry into more and more spheres of activity and influence. I then dropped out of this scene in order to learn and survive in the new world of social services management which was created during a period of five years when there was open and covert warfare over the future of social work, the personal social services, the health services and social security provisions in the UK, and reorganisations of local government, first in greater London and then throughout the whole of the UK.
While there was at times heated disagreement about the structure of Local Government, the National Health Service and the Social Security Services, there was general acceptance that there should be a national government run universal system for the provision of financial support to families and individuals divided between entitlements applicable to everyone, such as state pensions from the age of 60 for females and 65 for males and child benefit allowance for the first and subsequent children irrespective of financial circumstances, together with a range of financial supports based on individual assessments but where there was national policy, payment criteria and processes, which meant that you followed the same procedures and were assessed and awarded the same amounts wherever you lived with the consequence of fair system for everyone
This was also broadly the same approach in relation to the National Health Hospital Service which was divided between medical consultants and administrators, with nursing doing the work but having little say on policy and organisation, and where forty years later and twenty and more management restructurings and attempts change the balance of interests and power between doctors, nurses and the organisation and management of computer programmes, everyone from Prime Minister to ward cleaner has not worked out what works and what does not, despite the growth in people employed, and in other resources, and despite improvement is many aspects of heath care. The arguments about organisation and management continue, and between a public funded and the private service and on the mixture of the two.
In social work the dilemma was whether to bring all the different public funded social casework work services, there were eight, into one professional and management system, or leave this to be decided by the local authorities with responsibilities for the majority, but where probation and prison work was part of the judicial system where it remains in England and Wales and within hospitals and other health services, which was subsequently brought under social services, and where there were also those who functioned within the charitable and non statutory section, provided by religious based bodies, and a plethora of individual bodies, some international, while others restricted to an area and sometimes employing one individual with a committee.
The decision was to bring everyone, exception probation and prison after care, in England and Wales into one training system and to call everyone a social worker, and leave it to employing bodies whether they continued to specialise in their chosen interest, or commenced to become Jack's and Jill's of social work practice as they were being trained to do. The problem was that a bloody war, in terms of job power and survival developed within the health services which led to the abolition of Medical Officers of Health and their powerful role within local government and to the abolition of the Hospital Administrator, subsequently, from which the Chief Executive was created, as someone with generic management skills and increasingly a capitalist commercial background, and which for a period of two years led to an unsuccessful attempt by local authority medical officers trying to hijack the local authority social services, including those of social work, and an equally bloody power and position battle between Children's Officers and Adult Welfare Service Managers where those behind the proposed creation of a combined social services and social work department within local government assumed the increasingly professionally qualified but small Child Care Service would predominate over the largely unqualified, except in the fields of mental health, but administratively larger, adult welfare service, when what happened was the effective and immediate destruction of the qualified and specialist child care service within local government.
The abolition of the Local authority Medical Officer of Health was a profound mistake and nothing will shake my belief that although you need to have a Chief Executive who is administratively and managerial competent and capable of operating in a business like way, he should be first and foremost a medical man or woman. You do have the best legal firms in the world run by people who did not train and practice as lawyers.
I had played a key, a pivotal role in preventing the take over by health of social work, not because it was a bad thing in principle, but because Medical Officers of Health and their employers were doing it for the worst of possible reasons, and had no idea about the nature and need for social casework, especially in relation to children and in the field of Mental Health. There were eight or nine different variations of reorganisations within local authority social services at the time and those of us directly involved in influencing and advising government were warned that unless this situation was stopped in its tracks it would be impossible to persuade parliament to introduce one system for England and Wales. I was put in charge of a committee to do that and within months we did.
However I was then frozen out from being directly involved in the subsequently battles for the nature of social work training and the organisation of social services within the local government structure because of my stated opposition to the formation of one social work organisation and to generic social work practice.. I was one of three votes cast against the abolition of the child care body and its absorption within the British Association (similar to those who see Britain being better outside of Europe unless it is able to maintain control over some fundamental aspects of Britishness). There were those who thought I was just peeved because it meant I would not move from Vice President to President, although I was to become the first chairman of the Family and Child Care section within BASW, whereas I could foresee this was no more than a step towards the deplorable and disastrous loss of skill and expertise and which it then took three decades of child deaths and child abuse within the new care system before government and the local authorities realised there was no alternative but to go back to having two structures, one for children under or allied to the education service, and one for adult social services allied to health.
There was another reason why I quickly dropped out of national involvements, I had to learn all about the services for adults, their needs and wishes, the professional policies and procedures, including the legislation. On day I was involved only in child care and the very next with services for the elderly, the disabled and those with mental health issues and where I had no training or previous experience, thus it was so for everyone, but with the difference that I held a management post with responsibility for devising the working arrangements to implement national policies as agreed and interpreted by my local authority employers, and at a time when my job, as with all jobs in England and Wales outside of London was to be abolished in three years with the creation of a new Local Government and Health management system, and where the local government and health systems were not to be coterminous.
What most of the general public did not understand, and I suspect together with many of those in Parliament without a knowledge of how local government works in practice, is that even if you have legislation introducing one pattern of services or one policy covering all local government provision of a service, the practice will vary between types of local authority structure and between authorities within the different types of authority. Indeed it was evident that within social services there were departments where thee was little or no change in how things were organised or in the levels and quality of services between 1971 and 1974 and I also got to know of situations where this was largely the situation two decades later, despite the changes in titles and defined written roles. This was not a surprise to me as I had previously joined one the biggest children's department in the UK where things had not changed for the better for two decades and some appalling care and practices had been allowed to develop.
It took me a decade to sort myself out in the new situation before I decided to accept invitations to participate in national activities and matters of national influence, and then restricted to a subject which I had come to know something about through personal experience and study. Then just as I had become confident and useful I learnt of proposals to change the Child Care and Adult Services in a fundamental way again and to do so in manner which would replicate the chaos and mismanagement of thirties year before. Although I attempted to respond to the national policy challenge and personal occupation challenge, combining my previous experience with that gained subsequently, I failed, in part through my own fault, although only a further decade was to pass before others decided that I had been right in the late sixties and early seventies as well as in the late eighties and early 1990's and commenced to make the essential changes. During those years I had learnt one important fact about myself and the system. It is easier to have an influence if you separate presenting and achieving the idea from oneself. If the objective is to stop something bad happening or change something for the better then personal gain and recognition should always be secondary and in most instances unnecessary and undesirable. Get others to do what you cannot do yourself.
This is not so for the stage and film actor and the makers if theatricals and films. Once you have made it you have to keep yourself at the forefront of attention within the profession and in the public eye, such is the competition and the difficulty achieving a comeback. It can be done, but it is wise not to take the risk, unless you are confident in what else you decide to do. These thoughts came to mind as I watched with frustration while one third of the Oscar's programme was devoted to the red carpet.
For the first time in several years I failed to see the films where the critics suggested film and acting performance could put them in the running, and even the announcement of nomination did not drive me immediately into the cinema, although I hold a fist of free seat vouchers. I plan to remedy from today or tomorrow. I also did not watch or listen to any news bulletins or magazine type programmes during Monday so that there would that mixture of emotions as the awards were announced. The Cohen Brothers received three Oscars on the night (to add to their previous one), for the best film, best direction and best adapted screen play from a published work. No country for Old men also resulted in an Oscar for Javier Barden as supporting actor, who together with Daniel Day Lewis and Marion Cotillard transformed themselves beyond facial recognition in their respective roles. Admittedly Day Lewis looks like his character from Gangs of New York and I was surprised that the film did not sneak in as best film given the praise from Mark Kermode although he does advocate seeing the film several times and being able to move around during the three hours of the film which I hope to see tomorrow. I was also interested by his comments about Juno to add the film to my list for which Diablo Cody received the award for original screen play.
Michael Clayton did rather well with Tilda Swinton replicating her Bafta for supporting actress and much nominated Atonement received one award for Music, while the Bourne Ultimatum got three in the area of sound and its editing, and for film editing. The importance of the Oscars in the world of world film box office is such that everyone nominated attends and everyone receiving a high profile award last year hands over awards to this year. Your future career depends on it.
Before the Oscar ceremony there was time to see the first 90 minutes of the original Howard Hawkes 1946 bringing to the screen of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, a film declared culturally, historically and aesthetically significant in 1997 to become part of the National Film Register. I have seen this film at least twice during the past decades, together with To have and Have not, made in 1944 which made her into a star when aged 19 having been a fashion model, and was drawn to the attention of Hawke's wife who showed him her photograph. She met three times married Humphrey Bogart on set and despite the restraints on and off the screen at that time, it is evident from their performance together, and subsequently in Dark Passage and Key Largo that this was to be the love of their lives. Two more films which I see again and again from time to time. The Hemingway novel based To have and have not has several echoes of the role which Bogart, (together with Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henried, Claude Raines, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) made into my at least once a year re-experience best film of all time, Casablanca. The Big Sleep has a complex plot which makes two viewings in quick succession to ensure one understands fully and some knowledge of the book is also helpful because a key issue in the film is blackmail over a pornographic photo, which has to be adjusted for what was allowed on screen, just as in the book Lauren's character strips naked and into Bogart's bed in order to bring him on side for her version of events, whereas in the film she is sitting dressed in his room in a chair. In the Michael Winner, Robert Mitcham version of the same film, the issues of pornography and homosexuality are raised openly, and there is nudity, but this adds nothing to the strength of the original production. Great is a generally misapplied expression, which I am as guilty of using as everyone else but great is what Humphrey Bogart was in all his work with Casablanca and the African Queen my two favourites. I came to see Lauren Bacall from her later work and it is only when viewing again those films made in her twenties does her young beauty combined with a worldly charisma hit you. She sings and swings a jazzy number in the film which emphasises her multi talent and it is easy to see why Bogart was swept off his feet and you can feel the enduring love when she speaks of him now in her eighties.
In contrast to the weightiness of the winning films of the Oscars and the Big Sleep, I have been enjoying reliving the first seven episodes of Yes Minister commenced in 1979 but held over until 1980 because of the election that year, There were only seven episodes in the three series of Yes Minister and 8 in each of the two series of Yes Prime Minister. I have the edited scripts in the form of dairies for the first series of both. There is not one programme which does not contain memorable insights and exchanges about the reality of politics, management, making change, making change work for the better. What amazes me is that even if Prime Ministers and would be Prime Ministers and Cabinet Minister do watch all thirty eight episodes before taking office, they do not appear to learn the lessons. In the opening episode as Jim Hacker comments on his first day at the Ministry of Administrative Affairs, a non existent government department and Cabinet post at the time, he writes of being warned by a colleague that the DA is political graveyard, along with the Home Office. On arrival finds everyone helpful, providing him with his ready made diary of meetings and visits and his boxes of papers requiring his personal attention. In reality a Cabinet Minister will have a team of Ministers and each will be supplied with background information papers on the department, its functions, its staff and its budget and the time table of ongoing commitments, the most important being Parliamentary Question Time, one of the Ministers will be a Member of the House of Lords, for the Department, and the Cabinet and its sub committees for the Cabinet Minister and a whole range of inter departmental committees and sub Committees for the other Ministers and where each activity will have an appropriate civil servant preparing or reviewing the Agenda papers, and preparing information and accompanying the Minister as appropriate. For each Committee or official meeting there would be internal briefing meetings attended by members of the Ministerial Team and Members of civil service at appropriate levels of seniority, although some of those involved will be quite young and comparatively inexperienced. There will also be official political advisers to balance the advice of officialdom. There are two types of Minister and senior Public servant. There are those who are interested in holding the office with its power, status and financial rewards and will fit into the system and carry out the political and managerial policies and practices determined by others, and those who see the position as the opportunity to pursue their political or managerial policies and practices and the best situation is where Chairman and Chief Executive, Minister and Chief Civil Servant, Local authority Chairman and Chief Officer each fall into one of the categories but not both. It does not matter in practice which role is performed by who, as long as the two roles are covered. If both are just interested in their position they are usually skilled in protecting themselves and therefore their department but from the public viewpoint this usually means that nothing will fundamentally change but everything will have the appearance of change and in stable times this can be a good thing, but hopeless in a crisis. If both want to do things and change things themselves then there is usually war and chaos and nothing gets dome and things go from bad to worse as they each concentrate on getting rid of the other. However if they at the same mind and outlook they can implement a revolution. Best therefore is a combination of the two.
I resist the temptation to work through the rest of the first episodes and the others as it would lead to my spending the rest of the day and week, and month, which is not bad idea, but will leave to those days when nothing come immediately to mind. I will also leave until later in the week, commenting about the horror story emerging from the Island of Jersey with the discovery of the remains of a former child in care following complaints about what happened some fifty years ago, and the announcement that other body finds will be expected. Today a former Minister says he will provide information about an earlier cover up. I am an expert on the way things can be covered up for good and for bad reasons, and the Yes Minister and Prime Minister series and books also explains the reality. Hollywood has also been very good at revealing the truth, although all this knowledge has no affect on those engaged in the covering up except to persuade them to become better at it.
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