Before launching into the main topic, I would like to give a hypothetical case to make valid points. Take a large cartel, with business in practically every level of life, whose managing director is dictatorial, secretive and treats the Board of Directors shamefully. He has a close friend on the board to whom he has promised his post when he retires. Strangely, instead of having his friend as deputy director, he places him in charge of finance and budgeting, while having a nominee for the post, which is basically a political and logistical move, because this man he can control. In effect the Board has no teeth. In due course the director retires, and his friend succeeds him.
The problems for the friend are that first of all he is trustworthy, and in consequence assumes that those around him are also trustworthy. Secondly he has been holding down a highly complicated department and in consequence has had little experience in running the whole cartel. Once in office he finds that he has inherited numerous advisers, some of whom are not trustworthy.
Because I was unable to write to the blog at the time when Gordon Brown, for some unbelievable reason, presumably on advice, decided to write those letters to the bereaved, I choose to mention it now in my own way. I believe Gordon is under such incredible pressure, with backbiting, the election looming, and a credit crunch, he hasn’t time to think rationally when he is advised. A moment’s thought of the logistics, the imbalances and the criticisms this idea would generate would have hit him under normal circumstances.
I have lived in Northern Ireland since I was demobbed in ’46, I love the country, I like and respect the people, and I would wish to live nowhere else. This does not, however, mean that I approve of the way that we are governed. As I find it incredible that our senior politicians can’t come to sensible solutions, because their aims are so disparate, that they trot along to number 10 to bludgeon Gordon to come round to their individual ideas and needs, one after the other. This is a case of the sort of pressures that he is under. Unfortunately it also shows to me, a man with a brilliant brain, and a gentle nature, who is not tough enough to put people in their place.