A Top Letter
And an excellent reply
We offer the Vulture Central tip of the hat today to toy train outfit Bigjigs for its audacious bid to run the UK's West Coast Mainline rail franchise. For those of you not up to speed on the West Coast Mainline fiasco, entertain yourselves with this blow-by-blow account down at the Beeb as to how the nation that invented the …
Sir Humphrey:
Well briefly, Minister, I am the Permanent Under Secretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary. I too have a Principal Private Secretary and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are ten Deputy Secretaries, 87 Under Secretaries and 219 Assistant Secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretaries are plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Under-Secretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary.
Hacker: Can they all type?
Sir Humphrey: None of us can type. Mrs Mackay types: she's the secretary.
A private secretary is a mid level civil servant assigned to a specific minister with a remit to express his ministers' views, manage the ministerial diary, prioritise and correspond with people who wish to talk to the minister, and most importantly, to record a non political factual notes of decisions and events.
> "to record a non political factual notes of decisions and events."
I think you mean they record factual notes from a wide menu of choices of what was discussed in a meeting, and leave a clear record of what was decided, with a clear concience. Assuming they have a taste for such luxuries, of course.
I'm sorry, a number of large US corporations cross-licence patents on that to one another. That's why the US Department of Defense spends so much on stuff that doesn't work, and why our own dear Civil Service does the same. Just substitute "savings projection" for "revenue projection" and you've covered 90% of tenders.
In the good old days I would have applauded both the original letter, and the reply. These days... I'm old and cynical, and see it as an attempt on a clever self-promotion / viral marketing campaign for the above mentioned toy thingy. Which, if true, is still worth a pint, as it's original, haven't seen that one before. In which case, I wish to congratulate the minds behind it, particularly for their attention to detail, such as using this washed-out colour home printer to produce the headed paper. The one on the original letter, not one on the reply, from a secretary of the secretary.
I'm with you on that. If there had been some withering satire in there, I'd have supported the viral thing. eg if they'd quoted figures on failures and inefficiencies in the private rail sector.
What I was expecting was Hornby or someone making a public stand against the prostitution of our cherished industrial heritage, the degradation of rolling stock, the poor maintenance of lines etc. Instead I just got told "there's this toy company you've never heard of, and they're getting cheap publicity by spamming the civil service..."