They were outmuppeted by an ensemble performance of self-aggrandising flannel

Even now, looking back nearly a week later, it’s hard to make sense of it.

It’s just fractured memories of Deputy Daniel Wimberley and the speech that went on forever, repeating ‘and I’ll come back to that point later’ again and again like an awful threat, and Deputy Paul Le Claire urging unspecified people to ‘take cognisance’ of something equally unspecified over and over.

And then there was Senator Philip Ozouf talking about strange Greek gods, Senator Ben Shenton helpfully pointing out that 9 May is Liberation Day and Deputy Anne Pryke doing a shockingly good impression of someone who wasn’t the Health Minister after all.

But whose light shone most dimly? Who dragged themselves to the very bottom of the pack? If this was a TV talent show – who really didn’t have any at all?

First up of the main contenders was Housing Minister Terry Le Main, reporting back to the States on his decision to allow essential workers to buy the remaining 20% of Island properties that they were not already permitted to purchase. The decision, he said, was being suspended. But not because it was wrong, and not because he didn’t have the power to do it. Just because.

So J-category staff, having had free access to the Island’s housing supply for a fortnight, are now back where they were again, while the Senator takes some legal advice on whether he had the power to change it all in the first place. All in all, the unfortunate impression given is of a minister idly jotting out a few decisions while sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for a flight to Tenerife.

The most terrifying thing was the Senator saying that he would be getting some legal advice on his (suspended) decision. Wouldn’t you think that if you’re going to rewrite Jersey’s housing rules you might want to do that first?

But that, sad to say, was nothing compared to the awesome performance of Health Minister Anne Pryke, who faced questions over the Verita report which pointed to serious problems in the way that the Health department is managed.

More specifically of course, the report was about something that was very serious and deeply tragic – the needless death of a woman in a routine operation gone horribly wrong. In the answer to the first question she faced over the report, we learned that Deputy Pryke considered the death a tragedy. In answer to the second, we learned that putting things right was more important than holding individuals to account.

And that’s it – in the stumbling responses to the rest of the questions we got one or other of the first responses, or occasionally a combination of both. Nothing more.

Six months ago that kind of desperately bad performance could be waved away by the fact that the Deputy was new to her role. There really is nothing that can justify it now.

But the pair were trumped, aced and thoroughly outmuppeted by an ensemble performance of audacious point-missing and self-aggrandising flannel.

What Senator Ozouf said to the States was ‘here’s a proposition to replace the holiday that everyone will miss out on because Liberation Day is on a Sunday – please vote for it’.

What they seemed to hear was ‘tell us all about just how Jersey you are and just how much you love Liberation Day – take as long as you want’.

The fact that it brought Senator Ozouf onto the same side of a vote as Deputies Geoff Southern and Montfort Tadier and on the opposite side to four of his Council of Ministers colleagues was weird enough. But watching Member after Member wrap themselves up in metaphorical flags to proclaim how important Liberation Day was to them was too much, especially when a logical twist allowed that to be a reason for not giving everyone a holiday.

Those old enough to have been there on the day were accorded a strange status – as if somehow the timing of their birth was the product of the sheer force of their patriotic love for Jersey. Everyone else had to make do with talking about parents and grandparents – and in the case of a couple, deft allusions to old Jersey surnames.

You know the end result, of course. A group of people who work, on average, two days a fortnight in the States and another two in committee meetings – and who, let’s not forget, start at 9.30 am in the morning when they do work, and take an hour and a half for lunch – have decided that you don’t need a holiday in May to mark Liberation Day.

So, Jersey goes to having the fewest holidays in the EU – less than Guernsey, and half the number of Spain and Portugal. If there really had to be a loser of this Week in Politics, I can’t help feeling that it was us.