Posts tagged with Mismanagement

Millipede, Master of the Trivial Pursuit, continued his chase of the ineffable at PMQs earlier this week. He posed vexing questions, one after the other. Or maybe he vexed, posing questions. No one was quite sure. The PM was riled, having just been told to shut it by the speaker, and had no intention whatsoever of playing Mornington Crescent – by Stott’s Fifth Ammendment rules or any other for that matter – with the Right Hon. Gent. for Doncaster North. Instead, the PM had about him the air of a man who wanted to shoot something, preferably something with horns on it, like the Hon. Gent. opposite, but tiresomely had shot his gillie, or maybe it was his wife, instead.

Meanwhile, the Hon. Gent. for Doncaster North continued to bombard the PM with the kind of questions more commonly found in the economy ranges of Christmas crackers. It was said he might ask how many fish swam in the Serpentine, or how many paperclips Mr Stephen Dorrell, MP, the once and future health secretary, had secreted in his ears. These, then, were the pressing questions the house was obliged to contemplate; and these, then, were the questions to which only Millipede knew the answers.

The Orwellian coup of calling the corporate bodies that run the NHS ‘trusts’ – with the comforting overtones of propriety and trustworthiness - hides the fact that underneath the surface they are like any other corporation: selfish, secretive and psychopathic.

Dr No was brought to this cheerful observation by a dull but worthy documentary aired by BBC2 last week. Fronted by a man with a puffy dial whose every alternate sentence started ‘I wanted to find out…’, Why Did You Kill my Dad? was an over-scripted attempt to, err, find out ‘the true scale and [human] cost of killings by the mentally ill in Britain today’.

Hierachiology – the “-ology” that studies hierarchies – was founded by Dr Laurence J Peter, who also gave his name to the eponymous Peter Principle: that, in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.