The House of Comedy

That the holder of one of the great offices of state is reduced to sending her husband out to the garden gate, to meet the press and take the rap for ordering “Additional Features” on the Pay-to-View package that we, the tax payers, paid for, shows just how far this government has sunk.

What should now worry Labour politicians most is not the contempt in which the government is now held – politicians after all have very thick skins – but that it is now simply the punchline of a smutty joke.

James Forsyth in his Coffee House post, Governments can recover from rage but not ridicule says it all,

These revelations [that Jacqui Smith’s husband’s pay per view porn films were charged to the taxpayer and that Nigel Griffiths MP took dozen of photographs and uploaded them to his computer of a Commons sex romp that he first denied and then claimed not to remember] are so damaging because they will lead to the voters just laughing at the government. When the electorate rages at a government, its members can at least console themselves they are being taken seriously. But when they are being mocked, there is no such consolation.

The cat’s away

Poor old Jacqui Smith. I am not sure which is worse: that she claimed for the TV package, her denial that she hadn’t watched the films in question (“livid and shocked” ~ sounds as if she actually had seen them), or that her husband resorted to adult films while she was dossing down in her sister’s back bedroom.

Mind you, if I was married to Jacqui Smith I would probably have resorted to adult films long before now.

Bishops say silly things (No surprise there)

You can always rely on a Bishop to say something stupid: it must be part of the training. So yesterday evening, up pops Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, on the Six O’Clock News, to comment on Evan Harris’ Private Members Bill to amend the Act of Settlement. And in case you missed it, listen on BBC iPlayer: it’s roughly 14 minutes into the News.

Described in the introduction as a “senior Anglican leader”, my lord bishop launched straight into it,

It’s wretched to say so today, but Roman Catholics were regarded [in the Eighteenth Century] as like Al Qaeda or the Taleban are today.

There you have it: an obligatory hand-wringing preface, a reference to the bogey men of the Modern Age to point up how frightfully misguided our forefathers must have been, and wrong history. And all for a sound bite.

Instead the Act was another demonstration of Parliamentary power.

. . . a further Provision to be made for the Succession of the Crown in the Protestant Line for the Happiness of the Nation and the Security of our Religion. And it being absolutely necessary for the Safety Peace and Quiet of this Realm to obviate all Doubts and Contentions in the same by reason of any pretended Titles to the Crown and to maintain a Certainty in the Succession thereof to which your Subjects may safely have recourse for their Protection

The need was for certainty in the succession: Queen Anne’s only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester had died in 1700 and Parliament, dominated by the Tory/Country Party interest, went for the Protestant Hanoverian line, and excluded the 57 or so Roman Catholic heirs.

A bleak future

Following on from Jordan Furlong’s recent post in Law 21 (which I commented on some days ago), a snippet from Legal Risk LLP’s March Newsletter*, after a law firm risk management conference in Chicago,

The future shape of law firms

The traditional leveraged model of law firms with large numbers of associates was under attack from clients’ general counsel, one commenting that partner: associate ratios of 1:1 delivered better results than 2 or 3:1 – “the shape of the successful law firm is not a pyramid”. We know UK firms with corporate practices are increasingly under pressure to service in-house legal teams with specialist advice rather than do whole transactions – as one risk management partner put it succinctly, firms are being asked to take 10 per cent of the fees and 90 per cent of the risk.

This has been my recent experience in the UK, so what is happening that side of the Atlantic is already reflected over here.

* Legal Risk LLP’s website is http://www.legalrisk.co.uk/ . There is no hypertext link to the March Newsletter, but it is well worth reading. I rate Frank Maher really highly and he always talks sense.

Not another meeting

I have never much enjoyed internal meetings, whether management, business development, risk management, department, start the week, or whatever. When I was more closely involved in the day-to-day management of my practice they were the bane of my life. It was very refreshing reading Luke Johnson’s take on them in his FT column yesterday,

I am constantly astonished by managers in large organisations who obsessively attend internal meetings. Often these grey affairs have a dozen or more participants, each feeling they must make a contribution to justify their existence. It is my idea of corporate hell. It astonishes me to meet middle-ranking figures who have such bookings stretching not just for months ahead, but perhaps even into next year. What is it that goes on in all these crucial gatherings?

Committees almost by definition are a black hole into which time is sucked. Usually, they are planned months in advance, looming on the horizon on a Monday morning, primed to bore you to death. They are dominated by minutes, agendas, protocol and other matters of ultimate tedium. I rather admire those outfits that hold sessions where everyone has to stand up. It gives the event a real sense of urgency, I suspect. In these straitened times, such a stripped-down attitude feels rather appropriate – along with a genuinely flexible attitude to how you spend your day.