Rewarding failure will not win Boris favour, or voters

A SINGLE paragraph last week tells you all you need to know about modern Britain. Anglian Water’s chief executive Peter Simpson and its chief financial officer Steve Buck were paid more than £2.2million in bonuses while the quango delivers a rotten performance.

The year before last it spilt untreated sewage into our rivers and streams 17,428 times. Once again reward for failure seems to be the hallmark of our public sector.

If Boris Johnson really wanted to restore himself among the British people he would instigate a campaign of dismissals right across the army of parasites who infest and govern our useless quangos and become millionaires off our backs. A Night of the Long Knives, or at least a Night of the Long P45s.

He would gain a thousand enemies but five million disenchanted Tory supporters flocking back to his banner. But rather than be our champion, which he used to be, he now rules only for the bone-idle elite. On every hand failure is richly rewarded.

SOMEWHERE there must be a laboratory with boffins hard at work. What they are seeking to discover is the sealing mechanism of a consumer item so complicated that the purchaser will never get it open without the liquid content squirting all over the kitchen.

Item after item entering Chateau Fred seems to have been sealed in a manner so obscure that unless one trained at Bletchley Park in the art of decoding one risks skin and fingertips wrestling with the seal before realising it was at the other end all the time.

IT SEEMS this spring we may have a repeat of a measure of some years ago – establishing road blocks here and there to protect migrating toads as they cross the roads. I once witnessed the following on a country lane.

A rural constable stepped into the road in the path of a single oncoming car and held up a firm hand in an obvious “stop” sign. The car, open-topped and, as I could hear, carrying German tourists, obediently braked.

From the sedge emerged a female mallard leading her six chicks. All waddled across the lane to safety. The constable turned to the car, saluted the occupants and waved them forward. As they went past me I heard the father tell his children in the back: “Now you know why we couldn’t defeat them.”