Never mind all the important things there is to do, let's try expanding WEB again ...

The mightiest of the range of peaks facing the Council of Ministers is, of course, the comprehensive spending review and the 10% public sector cuts.

But it’s a peak beyond Himalayan proportions. People have been tipping up at the top of Mount Everest since 1953 with increasing regularity to the extent that the litter they leave behind is becoming a problem of its own.

There are fewer people who live in St John than have been to the top of Mount Everest, and there’s a lot fewer than that who believe that the 10% cuts will ever be made.

But that’s not important right now.

What’s important is some kind of explanation for what might distract some of your team of climbers to abandon the long ascent of debate mid-pitch, and wander down the mountainside to do something else entirely.

It is the strangest thing about this Council of Ministers that no matter what else is going on, no matter what else is happening, that they always – always – have time, energy and political capital to spend on the Waterfront.

Consider the list of work building up that Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur acknowledged at the start of the year: cutting 10% of spending, rewriting the tax system, new policies on transport and migration, preparing for the aging population, agreeing a new gambling law, replenishing a dwindling pensions pot, a new health strategy and a new Island Plan.

If you take all that away from what a government is expected to do, there isn’t a lot left. And it wouldn’t be harsh to say that in the six months since the start of the year, not one job has been crossed off of that list.

And yet, and yet … despite having failed at the task twice before, the Council of Ministers are now having another crack at the job of winning agreement to expand the Waterfront Enterprise Board.

The springboard for this latest crack at expanding WEB is a report by independent property consultants DTZ that came to the conclusion that everyone’s favourite Waterfront quango was unfairly criticised, and had performed well in the face of difficult conditions.

If that seems a slightly strange verdict, consider the list of people that they spoke to for the report: the Treasury Minister (who is responsible for WEB), a bunch of senior civil servants and WEB itself – essentially all of the dozen or so people who think that the board is great and wonderful – and no-one else.

The logic of taking an underachieving and expensive organisation like WEB and giving it more responsibility and scope is not easily understood, and exactly what the urgency is with all this is likely to be a complete mystery to more than a few people.

And that mystery is made deeper by the corresponding lack of urgency attached to, say, the Millennium Town Park, the Freedom of Information Law, legislation outlawing discrimination on grounds of racism, ageism, sexuality or gender.

Having tried and failed to get this through twice before – as the Jersey Enterprise Board, and subsequently the Jersey Development Company – the Council of Ministers may find that the biggest question facing them this time around is not whether they’ve finally got it right, but why the urgency? What do they think they are going to get out of this?

Speaking of the Council of Ministers, the latest member to join the ragtag band of mountaineers – or, if you prefer, the last to join this hideously over-extended metaphor – is Deputy Sean Power, who last week succeeded Senator Terry Le Main as Housing Minister.

States Members backed him over the Chief Minister’s nominee, Deputy Jackie Hilton, by 28 votes to 20 in a secret ballot on Tuesday.

It’s an interesting selection – not least because the Deputy, like the other uninvited guest at the Council of Ministers, Education Minister James Reed, has personal experience at the ‘unsexy’ end of his remit.

Deputy Reed’s experience is in vocational education, and he lost no time in putting more energy and effort into expanding that side of the department’s work.

Deputy Power’s, as he told the JEP on Saturday, is in unqualified accommodation. His promise to do more to guarantee better standards of accommodation for immigrants was a bold statement of intent for someone who has only 18 months in the job, and who has other projects including discounted housing, financial independence for his department and the capture of population policy to pursue.

But how sure he can be of any great measure of affection or support from his new colleagues is in question, considering he dealt them an embarrassing blow over duty increases six months ago, and given his five-word answer to the question of which areas of ministerial policy he disagreed with. It may be that ‘how long have you got?’ was not the most politic of choices.