How long before the only suitable candidates for Bailiff are UK-imported lawyers?

All well and good for the Prime Minister to stand up in the Big House and prattle on about the employment board having concerns that mirrored his but no one has yet told those of us who foot the bill for this expensive nonsense precisely how it came about.

To use an easy to understand football analogy – I’m always mindful that our elected representatives sometimes read this column and have no wish to make like more difficult for them than it is already, and particularly so in election year – if a Premier League footballer such as Arsenal’s Cesc Fabregas has five years left on his contract then it will cost Barcelona very much more to persuade those holding his contract to sell him than, for example, it will if he’s only got a year left.

Although I hold out no hope whatsoever of my question ever being answered, by Prime Minister Terry Le Sueur or anyone else, I think it is fair to ask whether Mr Ogley’s pay off – being the contractual obligation it was described as – would have diminished in value with the passage of time, or whether, as I strongly suspect, it would have cost us that cool half million no matter when it was ‘mutually agreed’ that he should use the second half of his return ticket on the gravy train and return from whence he came.

In other words, was our obligation to pay him all that money – no matter when – part of the original agreement or, to put it bluntly, did it cost us that to (putting it politely) dispense with his valuable services?

Still, it was good to read that despite three civil servants applying for the job vacated by Mr Ogley not being deemed suitable, Prime Minister Le Sueur had the gall to repeat that totally discredited old chestnut that ‘we are committed to providing development for all our staff, to ensure that local candidates have the right experience to enable them to succeed in the most senior positions in the States’.

By the time the club and association annual dinner season starts in the autumn that, for after dinner speakers looking for a topical local joke that will raise a laugh, will have replaced ‘we’re from the States, we’re here to help you’ as one of the Three Great Lies – the other two being ‘I’ll love you just as much in the morning’ and ‘there’s a cheque in the post’.

Given that that commitment was first uttered by Senator Le Sueur’s predecessors at least three (and probably four) decades ago, perhaps at his next question time in the Big House someone will ask him to give an assessment, with examples, of its success rate.

In the meantime, I sit in The Shed with a glass of Calvados in my hand and wonder how long it will be before one of Senator Le Sueur’s successors as Chief Minister announces, with the customary expression of regret, that no suitable local candidate had been found for the office of Bailiff and therefore the Monarch will be forced to select a lawyer from the United Kingdom?

Fantasy land or simply an illustration of a situation which is now so totally out of local control that literally nothing is beyond the realms of possibility? I shall leave it to The Reader to exercise his or her judgment on that question.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned gravy train trundles on with the disclosure that no fewer than 32 locums have been used – at a cost of £1.77 million in the last five years – to cover the work of four Hospital doctors prevented from carrying out their full jobs.

While Nurse Anne Pryke’s assertions about patients safety being paramount are not a matter for debate – on the basis that no sensible person would disagree – might it not be opportune for someone to say something about precisely why these Hospital doctors are not able to do the jobs for which they are paid (and for which we appear to be paying twice) and when the situation is likely to be resolved?

That said, the fact that they’ve had to find the 32 locums to do the work and, according to Health Minister Nurse Pryke, they (and presumably all the other applicants for the locum posts) have had to go through a set recruitment process, might go some way toward explaining why the department over which she presides finds it necessary to employ a veritable battalion of human resources staff.

I wonder which of the director of resources, projects manager, interim case manager, human resources manager for community and social services, human resources manager for ‘hospital’, medical staffing manager, ten human resources officers and two human resources assistants were involved in that particular arduous task and how many of the remainder were staring out of the window at seagulls stamping their feet in the Parade Gardens in the hope of inducing a worm to think it’s raining.

And finally,

While I acknowledge that there is never a good time to start discussing financial matters with the recently bereaved, might I suggest that a newly widowed elderly woman being sent a letter just four days after her husband’s death telling her that she was no longer entitled to certain Social Security benefits is more than just a mite insensitive.

However, those like me and the elderly woman’s family who found the timing inappropriate and insensitive appear to be in a minority, according to Social Security. They say many welcome getting such information as soon as possible.

Perhaps they’re too upset to complain.