Wanted: A group of leaders who speak with one voice

And that is exactly why they waited six weeks to use comments made by Assistant Chief Minister Sir Philip Bailhache about the Island being ‘prepared’ for independence if the need arises – comments which, if it hadn’t have all kicked off with Jimmy Carr and the K2 ‘aggressive tax avoidance’ scheme, would probably have never been used at all.

Whatever – we can deal with that. That is, after all, what we in the profession do – we find hooks to hang our stories on to make them relevant and keep our readers interested.

Of course, The Guardian’s treatment of the Senator’s comments was, to say the least, pushing it a bit. But as I said, it happens, especially with national newspapers that have no local community to hold them to account. And that is one thing we can, as the Chief Minister would say, learn lessons from, draw a line under and move on.

But what was more curious were the rumours of ‘tensions’ at the top between the likes of Chief Minister Ian Gorst, Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf and Senator Bailhache.

And it wasn’t just The Guardian that suggested it – many Islanders got the sense that perhaps words had been had between the three men (and probably others, too) about how exactly the Island should respond to these ‘aggressive’ tax avoidance schemes. And maybe they had.

Because, on paper, they all appeared to be saying different things. Senator Gorst, for example, released a statement saying: ‘There is no wish or need to accommodate or give encouragement to those who seek to involve Jersey in aggressive tax planning schemes to avoid UK tax.’

Not long afterwards, his Treasury Minister appeared to suggest on Twitter that he thought otherwise, tweeting: ‘I don’t think it’s the place of our government to comment on the moral application of activity which is legal.’

Given the timing, this could, and for many was, taken as an attack on his Chief Minister for saying what he had not long before.

Senator Bailhache, meanwhile, spoke about a difficult kind of grey area where things are within the law but thought of as being immoral. His response, basically, was to say that if people feel that strongly, they should be changing the law to make it illegal.

But, when you actually look at it in more detail and take into account where and how these comments were made, they aren’t as far apart from each other as it may first appear.

Instead, each politician was probably answering slightly different questions. Put them altogether and, basically, you have a government response that goes something along the lines of ‘We aren’t encouraging these schemes to use Jersey because that would make us look bad (or perhaps even worse in the eyes of some), but they are legal, and morality is a very difficult, and subjective, issue to address. If people (and by that we mean probably the UK) feel strongly enough about it, they can go ahead and change the law to make it illegal.’ And make of that what you will.

It would, perhaps, have been just a little better for everyone – and one less piece of ammunition for our critics – if they had got together and come up with a slightly more refined, combined response.

So, no real tensions there, then. It’s all happy, productive and lovely at the top. Or is it? Well, yes, perhaps at the ‘top of the top’ it is. And by that I mean that the little crew of Senators Gorst, Bailhache, Ozouf and, to some extent, Ian Le Marquand, who appear to be all working quite nicely together.

The problem is, did we ever sign up to a two-tier Council of Ministers whereby the rest of the executive are sidelined most of the time? It also begs the question: Who is really running the show?

Because that is what is starting to emerge (or is already in full swing) just nine months after we heard all that waffle about working together, a new, more open, transparent and cohesive government.

Naturally you are always going to get some ministers who are more powerful than others, and equally naturally, that is always going to involve the Chief Minister in some form, because of his position, and the person holding the purse strings.

And if you ask the Chief Minister et al about this, they will tell you that they are working on some kind of working group about tax, or pensions or something like that.

But it appears that this ‘working group’ has actually become a kind of de facto executive – the top of the top, as it were.

And there are three problems with this. The first is that it makes the concept of collective responsibility, whereby the whole Council of Ministers can be held to account for decisions, unfeasible and, indeed, wrong. That is because it can never be right to hold people to account who don’t have any real say in the decision making.

Now, I am not saying that the rest of the Council of Ministers are not making any decisions, or helping to, because they are. They just aren’t involved in it all as we would perhaps expect, or are brought to the table very late in the day when decisions have been as good as made already.

And there lies the second problem: surely it makes them feel sidelined, second-class and, well, a little bit rubbish, none of which is conducive to good government.

Thirdly, the idea that there is this two-tier system that we, the voting public, don’t really know about makes us suspicious. And a suspicious public is an unsettled, unhappy public.