Quite a lot of people have got A Philip Ozouf Story

My Dad had one. It was about a young Philip Ozouf pitching up at his house in around 1996 to ask for votes for his own father, then running for Constable. Sure, said Dad, but I’d rather vote for a younger bloke like you. No chance, says Philip, I’m not interested in politics.

Another States Member had one too. This all happened probably 2004-ish, and it was about Philip Ozouf nominating a States Member who was a bit of a nightmare to work with onto his (the other bloke’s) committee. ‘What did you do that for?’ asked the other bloke. ‘Because you needed to be punished,’ hissed Senator Ozouf, reminding him of some slight weeks before.

As we found out this week, the former States chief executive Bill Ogley had one as well. It was about the Senator waging a two-year campaign of harassment and interference against him, spreading rumours about his failure over a tax issue, having a pop over the appointment of the new Treasurer, and telling him he wouldn’t work with him if he became Chief Minister. The upshot of all that was that we (the taxpaying public) ended up paying Mr Ogley £546,337 to stop working for us.

My Philip Ozouf Story is a little bit different. It starts with the Senator and I not getting on. And we don’t – that’s one of the very few things that we would ever agree on. It’s just one of those things that happens – some people don’t get on with each other.

It’s partly down to personalities, and it’s partly down to how we both go about our work. We’ve got very different ideas about why we don’t get on, and it’s not worth getting into them. Mostly, like with most people who don’t get on, it’s down to a long history of not getting on.

But last year, when my Dad got very ill I got a surprising text message from Senator Ozouf offering his support. He said he was very sorry to hear things weren’t going well, and that if I wanted a chat, he was available.

As the weeks went on, he sent the odd message from time to time – all in a very supportive and solicitous way, to check in. And when my Dad died in the summer, he called and spoke in very touching and personal ways about the grieving process, about the importance of family, and about his own experiences.

I haven’t forgotten that conversation, and I won’t. Nor will I forget the other conversations with people I barely know (States Members including Senator Philip Bailhache, Deputy John Le Fondré and Deputy Trevor Pitman among them) who said very kind and supportive things that meant a lot to me then.

And everything else that follows should be read against that backdrop – that Senator Ozouf is a man who, when he heard that a bloke he doesn’t like was struggling with bad news, just picked up the phone and offered his support.

And actually, the question of who he is has become a relevant one – it may be that we’re not meant to acknowledge that politicians have personalities for fear of offending or invading privacy, but the reality is that a personality clash between a politician and a civil servant has cost Islanders a huge amount of money – £546,337, to be precise.

The first thing to say is that who he is, and who he thinks he is, are too wildly different things.

The Senator calls himself a liberal, claims he wants ‘positive politics’ and that he’s a reformer – and that’s not, in its own strange way, untrue. It’s probably how he genuinely thinks about himself.

The truth? That’s more difficult, but it’s fair to say that the truth about someone is going to have more to do with what they have done than what they have said.

So what has he done? He’s the Treasury Minister who promised not to raise GST, but did anyway. He’s the one who said he’d sort out the problem of foreign non-finance firms not paying tax here, but didn’t. He’s the one (along with Senator Ian Gorst, now the Chief Minister) who dropped higher Social Security contributions for top earners last June, saying they didn’t need the money any more.

He’s the one who said that he’d save £50m and then £70m, and who is left floundering as the cuts package struck rocks marked ‘School Fees’. He’s the one who – when this newspaper forced the Treasury department to reveal that it had written off £15m in uncollected tax – put the information out early in a heavily-spun press release so that the other media ran a story reporting simply that the tax collection rate was higher here than the UK. And he’s the one who led to us paying Mr Ogley (a civil servant with unblemished appraisals and reports) more than half a million pounds to go away.

That’s not the whole story.

He’s also – along with former Senator Stuart Syvret – one of the most gifted politicians of his generation in terms of his ability to rally support within the States and to shift and be shifted by public opinion. That neither of them would be flattered by the comparison does not make this untrue.

And that’s why, really, it wasn’t a surprise to hear the Senator ‘welcome’ the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report, or to hear him try to paint himself as a whistle-blower in respect of Mr Ogley’s departure – rather than the cause of it. That’s just good spin – like the oft-repeated lines that no bad news comes unexpected, or his labelling of this newspaper as the ‘Jersey Misery Post’.

It wasn’t a particular surprise, either, to hear him go on the offensive and start attacking the Comptroller – especially with drafts of his next report on the Lime Grove fiasco circulating, and said to be pretty damning about just about everyone involved in the whole saga behind the plans of a new police station, Senator Ozouf included.

But is the writing on the wall for the Treasury Minister? Is he finished?

Probably not. But if there was a moment to mark his changed fortunes it wasn’t this week – it was a fortnight ago in front of the Corporate Services Scrutiny panel.

Across the table from him sat Senator Sarah Ferguson, Grouville Constable Dan Murphy and Deputies James Reed and Sean Power – all of whom have been given, over the years, plenty of reasons to hold a grudge against the Senator because of the way he’s lorded it over them or spun against them.

And that’s the story here. Senator Ozouf is – you can almost hear the howls of protest already – the inheritor of the old go-for-growth, free-market tribe that held sway here for decades under people like Pierre Horsfall, Frank Walker and Terry Le Sueur. It was this thinking that led to rampant population growth with no thought whatsoever to the implications for planning and housing, economic diversity and jobs, or infrastructure and health spending.

It was that thinking that left us facing the problems that we are facing now.

But there’s a new tribe in charge. The likes of Chief Minister Ian Gorst, Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand, Education Minister Pat Ryan and Economic Development Minister Alan Maclean are genuine moderates, who inherit from the last tribe a whole raft of problems. That moderate tribe is growing in size and power – it’s interesting to note here that even the conservative candidate for Chief Minister, Senator Philip Bailhache, wanted the Treasury Minister’s powers clipped.

And it’s interesting to note that control of States human resources and IT was swiftly snatched back from the Treasury as soon as Senator Gorst got the Chief Minister’s job, and that Senator Ozouf’s jaunts abroad have been sharply curtailed.

But to employ the Senator’s favourite rhetorical device, is he finished? Unlikely. Does he, at the end of the day, put in a full day’s work? He certainly does. Is he likely to keep the Treasury job? Probably, but he won it by only two votes in the first place. Is he going to struggle in the 2014 elections? Yep, if he stands. Would I vote for him? You know, I probably would. Would I like it? No.