First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

The only way to start your day

Since Sunday, the papers have been delighting in a leaked 11-page document of instructions to minions whose choicer extracts run something like this:

Coffee/Lunch. I’m addicted to coffee. I like a cappuccino when I come in, an espresso at 3pm and soup at 12.30-1pm.

The room should be cleared before I arrive in the morning. I like the papers set out in the office before I get in. The white boards should be cleared.

If I see things that are not of acceptable quality, I will blame you.

Never put anything to me unless you understand it and can explain it to me in 60 seconds.

We need to produce a grid . . . outlining [the] story of the week. Once something has been slotted into a grid, my expectation is it will be delivered. Moving something from a grid slot is a very, very big deal.

And who might be the hyper-critical diva in question? The editor of a national magazine or newspaper, perhaps? No, the tone is much too reasonable for that. In fact, it’s one Liam Byrne, currently Minister for the Cabinet Office, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and chief “enforcer” to Gordon Brown (not to mention a Prospect contributor). It seems, however, that Byrne has chilled out somewhat since issuing these guidelines back in 2006. The day after the story broke, this is what he had to say about the incident on his own blog:

Ah well, I guess it had to happen. Someone has kindly furnished the Mail on Sunday with the 2006 notes I gave to my office civil servants to prepare them for the shock of their workaholic new minister and his rather extensive list of faults and foibles. It’s been a while since I’ve read the Mail on Sunday, but I’m guessing that they’ll have some well-justified fun at my expense. In these matters it is always best to remember Gerald Ford’s aphorism to take your job seriously, but never yourself. And as my wife commented, if they think that’s bad, they should see the note for ‘Living with Liam Byrne’….(that’s a joke)

Which is rather nicely done—and in keeping with a senior civil service source’s comment to Prospect that “people are quite phlegmatic about” the original directive, because “at least he [Byrne] is clear about what he wants and people respect him.”

It also made me think, though, how useful blogs are as a kind of public middle-ground between written statements (which tend to be formal, unread in their entirety and highly selectively quoted by journalists) and spoken statements (which are informal but ephemeral, and tend to endure only in the highly selective soundbites noted by journalists). Blogs are—or can be—informal, readable public records; not to mention a circumvention of the selectivity of the press. Then again, judging by the number of comments Byrne’s blog has attracted thus far (one, the from Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Welwyn Hatfield), this particular experiment in direct democracy has some way to go.