Gizza job?

There is a bit of a buzz about the Blairs at the moment, with the Daily Mail printing a series of articles about the reviled couple’s money-making enterprises post Number Ten. It’s not comfortable reading. There’s the government pension, of course, enough in itself for the average person to feel they’d hit the jackpot. But that’s peanuts compared to the suspiciously astute property deals, the huge fees for private speaking, seats on managing boards and  ludicrous but well-remunerated roles such as ‘Middle East Peace Envoy’ which paid him handsomely without there ever being any delivery of the promised peace.

Yes, it’s the Daily Mail – hardly friends of Blair – but it’s not the person it’s the principle; how do otherwise average achievers reach exalted positions? It’s like a re-imagined version of the Peter Principle, whereby dullards reach and remain in jobs at which they are incompetent. The phrase ‘promoted out of trouble’ has long been used to describe the inexplicable rise of the clumsy, the inept and the downright embarrassing who, on screwing up a position are promoted rather than being fired. But for most people it tends to stop there: The boss’s son is given a cushy back seat job on higher pay but out of sight. The high-flying fuck up is gently placed on a path to a lucrative pension; no heavy lifting involved.

But every other day the newspapers seem to have stories about people being sacked from ridiculously well-paid jobs for levels of incompetence that beggar belief. And then being paid hefty sums to stop them from telling tales to honour pre-engagement ‘early release’ clauses. Some people manage to go from being sacked from one high-profile job after another, apparently picking up their multiple-millions each time; enough for an average person to retire to the sun many times over. And they seem to do this with not one shred of shame or acceptance of blame. How many of us have musingly volunteered to take on one such job, fuck up and then disappear with a suitcase full of money?

The top of society is littered with grandiose failures; the men who spent £11billion on a computer system for the NHS, which never worked. The arms procurement programmes which also cost billions but likewise never get delivered. Massive, vainglorious reorganisations of government departments, disrupting lives, costing millions, but never being completed because administrations change. Bankers who bow out having bankrupted their companies in the pursuit of ‘shareholder confidence’. And in their wake, a trail of lawyers, accountants and asset-stripping parasites, all getting rich from ineptitude, while lowlier clients lose their livelihood.

How did I get here? Fuck knows.

Ambitious parents used to tell their children to set goals and work to achieve them. To decide what they wanted to do in life then work hard to become the very best they could. Have a game plan, keep your nose clean and keep on plugging away, son, you’ll get to the top if you deserve it and do the right thing. But work no longer pays that way, it seems. A conscientious parent should consider imbuing in their offspring that in fact it is crime which pays, ideally very public crime, with misuse of office and misappropriation of funds being the very pinnacle of success. In Boys From the Black Stuff, Yosser went round saying “Gizza job, I can do that!” Today he’d be saying “Ah go on, mister, give us the sack, eh?”

In the Prime

In 1955 Cyril Northcote Parkinson observed that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. Actually, he observed this some years before, but being a busy man it took him a while and he only actually finally (and ironically) wrote it down as the publisher’s deadline approached. Just as well he did because otherwise the world would have been deprived of Parkinson’s Law. Without these eponymous laws to guide us, negotiating this mortal veil would be a far more perilous journey. Thanks to such visionaries as Boyle, Hooke and Ohm and solid thinkers such as Parkinson, Murphy* and Sod we understand our world so much more clearly than did our forefathers.

Everybody knows from experience the inevitability of Parkinson’s, whereby your kids never start their homework until the day before it needs to be handed in and how when you start to catch up on your Sky-Plus listing suddenly you find you’ve been sitting on your arse all day. But old Parkie goes further than this simple principle and also notes such pithy realities as: “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved” and ‘Orgmanship’ which is "The tendency of all administrative departments to increase the number of subordinate staff, 'irrespective of the amount of work (if any) to be done." 

These statements practically amount to mission statements for all government departments, the NHS and any organisation given any public funding for any purpose whatsoever. Panels of ‘climate experts’, economic think tanks and the administration of the BBC all spring to mind as exemplars. But even in the lowliest collection of human work units there is still room to see the machinations of these universal laws in action. One such law is the Peter Principle, in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role, rather than whether they possess any abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and hence "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."

We all know at least one such co-worker, floundering around, doing more harm than good and often unaware of the chaos they leave in their wake. I sometimes think that a quiet cull might be in order but generally it is kinder to just let them do their thing, keep them out of harm’s way and give them an office in a quiet corner of the premises where they can do as little harm and generate as little expense as possible. Of course, this doesn’t always work; sometimes we have to promote them all the way out of trouble, elevating them to a position where they become entirely irrelevant. I’m calling this the Prime Minister Principle.

(* Murphy’s Law states, of course, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” but blog authors may be more familiar with its editorial counterpart:

Muphry's law – "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.")