I thought that an eccentricity until the weekend when I realised that appalling approach is now officially sanctioned.

Never mind the reality, what will John Humphrys ask me? This appears to be all that matters. Goodness knows how much of vital importance can be missed that way.

A civil servant has a duty to tell his minister what he thinks that minister ought to know and he cannot simply discard it because it is unlikely to be featured in questions.

Byrne would appear to be inviting his staff to neglect their prime function and he also appears to be saying that
ignorance is of no consequence as long as he sounds good when answering questions.

I doubt if any of those civil servants are even surprised because Government has been ruled by spin for a decade.

What you don’t know you can’t tell. Fine but nor can you make good judgments. I have never understood how the current economic mess was allowed to get so badly out of control.

Leverage is a posh word for borrowing and hedge fund is a posh phrase for a betting organisation.

Therefore a hedge fund operating on leverage is betting with borrowed money and they all appear to have been borrowing from each other. It was the economy of the madhouse.

Presumably some minister was so bothered about what he might be asked on Question Time that he didn’t do any asking of vital questions himself. What a way to run a country.

Yet now that way is the norm. All that civil servants are expected to concentrate on is where the trip wires might be, not on whether the device might explode anyway.

I can hope only that Liam Byrne’s permanent secretary (the senior civil servant in any department) said: “No, Minister.”