Rising East Online

With apologies to Harry Belafonte

—Captain Nemesis

Nemesis recalls that in salad days (defined as that age where you haven’t the faintest idea what salad days are), he learned much from a shabby tome called Deeds that won the Empire by W H Fitchett. Said Fitchett imparted knowledge of the battle lines at Badajoz and Aboukir Bay and a view that leadership was a damn fine thing sir. This is a theme which recurs in the public noise.More and better leadership is what we need for corporate success, public decency, effective policing, footy, gardening, space travel and the diminishment of sin. Leadership!

Of late, in The Pregnant Reticule and other Wildean pothouses, a contrarian view has been bandied about. Nemesis and chums - now the old folk in the corner cackling when people with teeth like that should observe the mien of the Mona Lisa - opine that leadership is a curse visited on organisations incapable of behaving better.

Opus Deayo, cerebral calypsonian of many tinkling years, happened recently upon the Theory of HSPALTA – hire smart people and leave them alone. This of course is quite wrong. Universities are full of smart people who need constant and vigorous prodding with AWAMs1, whambamthankyoumams, and so forth. The NHS is stuffed to the gills with doctors … er, nuff said.

But Opus, our resident saucyologist, is chocker with insight. Thames Gateway, he observes, has a challenge. Hundreds of leaders, no-one wanting to be led. People lurching canards against each others’ ideas like drunken mermaids at pétanque. And this notwithstanding the advantage we have of great persons like Lord Rigors of Mortis, The Archimandrite Deadboulder, The Fully Mature Nanoband and a full Privy of Councillors to help us. And forget not Blairio (posing stage right in Labour’s Loves Lost). But nowhere is there trotting gamely behind A Loyal Massive saying: ‘wherever you’re going, innit, we’ll do whatever we’re told, just give us the instructions’. No...

So Uncle Government has a beezer plan. A strategic framework for the Gateway which will bring about clarity and purpose, sequencing, phasing and much else besides to cheer the common portion, viz:

Com Mista Miliban
Mek strategic framework.
Markets
a failure
I need me a grant

Dev-o
Dev-o!
Need a shoppin centah
an new DLR
Dev-o
Dev-o!
Grant aid com
An me need to get mine.

Com Mista Miliban
Count regeneration.
Projects me
Got plenty
I need me a grant

Six bill
Seven bill
Eight bill
cost.
Crossrail a missin
An Thames Bridge

Treasury a check
Gordon check with caution.
Olympics
Com and
Cost escalate.

Dev-o
Dev-o!
Sust-ain-ab-le
Is a
Very hard ting.
Dev-o
Dev-o!
Com strategic
framework
mek it all mek sense.

Etc. Possibly. The difference between more Dan Twit and mordant wit is, of course. And, as critics agree, Disraeli. The conclusion. At least you can eat a chocolate teapot.

Souciantly enough, and ho for gung, Team Cackle in the public bar of the Lord Coniston’s Fanny offers a few strategising tips:

• The strategic framework should be made of chocolate. This in itself will be more popular than anything since rhubard and custard was legalised by Gladstone’s third ministry.
• Take the advice of the Campaign for Slow Government. Do not reorganise anything. Let the LSC evolve into a viable lifeform or die quietly in a corner and put the LDA on eBay. Hire some smart people, but only prod them monthly using the Mark IV sharp stick available from good umbrella retailers everywhere.
• Talk to the private sector because without their investment it won’t work. While many of them, obviously, eat children for breakfast and perform unnatural acts using pictures of Margaret Thatcher, string and herbal toothpaste2, many don’t.
• Observe the Principle of Personality Disorder – If a leader’s vanity exceeds his or her ability then, no matter how great that ability, they are a liability. Hunt them with gods (anagrams aren’t illegal, except in Lancashire).
• Adhere to the view that Government is there to sort out things for us which we cannot sort out ourselves – like Crossrail. After that, the policy and funding world should let the delivery end get on with it. Endless short term projects and schemes are a part of The National Risk Aversion (one careful owner, the Public Accounts Committee), not a grown-up way to do regeneration.
• Talk to the common folk because without their investment it won’t work. Many of them are annoying, eat worms and fart. But this does not offset their democratic status, only render it faintly malodorous whilst depriving robins of their breakfast. Engage continually, not talk then leave hastily without answering questions – as ministers pathologically do.
• Anything which involves taking 70 years to do something which should have taken 10 is doomed3, eg it will have taken this long to get the Thames Crossing bridge built. China which, like the Victorians, lacks a planning system to help it go more slowly, is not going to take 70 years to do anything except become the world’s largest economy. As Mario Andretti said, and he is still alive, if you think you’re in control, you aren’t going fast enough.
• If the race track is designed on any other basis besides sustainability, abandon the race (NB for the hard of cartography, a bad case climate change scenario is that the Gulf Stream stops for several thousand years and Britain has a climate appropriate to its latitude, eg Labrador or the Sea of Okhotsk).
• Take the long view. If you haven’t got a map, buy a telescope. And expect to be surprised by technology adoption. In both cases, experiencing a recurrent circular motion means you’re lost. Or dancing.
• More parties. Regenerating Thames Gateway shouldn’t feel, even on a bad day, as though you have inadvertently super-glued your buttocks to a passing train (not Crossrail, obviously).

The important thing is the chocolate. And the parties. And dancing.

Captain Nemesis is your pilot through the Thames Gateway.

Notes

1. Academic workload allocation model. Like Kate Moss, but with drugs.
2. Or is that the Lib Dems?
3. That’s doomed, as in doomed. Revelations 12, xvii.

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