Best Of

OT rant about government meetings. I've been sent this email for a Teams call:-

Please join the meeting 5 minutes before your allocated time of 11:15 by clicking on the link.
...
Join the meeting 10 minutes before your allocated time by clicking on the link. It is important that you are ready and join on time.

So in the course of a paragraph, they want me to join at 11.15, 11.10 and 11.05. This automatically generated nonsense must have been sent out for months if not decades with no civil servant bothering to read it.

Indeed, no civil servant will join before 11:20

The cheap jibe aside, one of my perennial bugbears in my local Government career was senior officers moving from meeting to meeting and often arriving late and unfocused and that applied both in the office and on Teams calls.

Managing meetings was a perennial struggle - I acquired a bit of a reputation for being a tyrannical Chair but I always wanted a 60 minute meeting to end after 50 minutes to allow those moving to the next meeting time to move, both physically and mentally, from the one issue to the next.

Part of what is perceived as the issue with decision making stems from this, I believe. Senior and especially middle management are overworked and become scared of taking decisions because they fear there has been inadequate discussion and the standard response is to arrange another meeting which rehashes all the old arguments wasting everyone’s time,

Whisper it quietly, but I suspect this happens in the private sector too.

I asked a chatbot yesterday how to waste as much time as possible by calling a pointless meeting.

If your goal is maximum wasted time, book a meeting titled:

“Alignment on the Alignment: Scope, Ownership, and Next Steps” (60 mins)

Agenda (aka time-sink fuel):
1) 10 min — “Context recap” (read the same thing everyone read yesterday)
2) 15 min — Define what “done” means (argue about words, decide nothing)
3) 10 min — Ownership (assign “shared ownership”, i.e., nobody)
4) 15 min — Options review (2 options, pick “we need more data”)
5) 10 min — Next steps (schedule another meeting)

Invite at least one person who shouldn’t be there and one person who can’t decide anything. End with: “Let’s take this offline” and don’t.

I laughed for a moment then realised it sounded just like all the meetings I actually have to sit through.

Good morning, everyone.

I see Trump remains less than delighted with the BBC.

To be fair he does have a point about the defamation, although IIRC the programme in question was never broadcast in the US and he’s not going to get a billion-dollar settlement from a UK court.

More likely he wants to waste BBC management time and make them hire a bunch of lawyers to defend themselves or apologise in court.

His comments on the BBC somewhat overshadowed by those on Rob Reiner, which were harsh even by his low standards of speaking about opponents. One should not speak ill of the dead, especially not given the circumstances, as many of his supporters and GOP politicians have made clear.

That post is wrong in so many ways…

He doesn’t have a point on defamation - the editing was poor and arguably misleading but it didn’t come up with anything that hundreds of others haven’t accused him of.

He’s out of time in the UK and the US courts (as you note) don’t have standing.

It’s just simply an attempted shakedown and fully credit to the BBC for standing up to him

The BBC editing would pretty easily win a defamation suit in the UK, and probably meat the “actual malice” standard of defamation of a public figure in the US.

It was a pretty egregious example of a total failure to uphold journalistic standards, and has severely damaged the BBC’s reputation especially in the US. You simply can’t edit someone’s words to make them say exactly the opposite of what they actually said.

What he wants, and will probably get, is an apology and a donation to his library or ballroom.

Another thing to note from the discussion is how easily people accept stats that are fairly obviously misleading if they fit their preconceived direction of travel. We can all be guilty of that so should remember to apply the equivalent of caveat emptor when requoting stuff.

I used to know a (Danish) supreme court judge who deliberately read a newspaper that he disagreed with, so as to combat his instinctive biases. I've tried it and it's quite difficult - you stumble over the alien assumptions rather than just get a balanced overall view. I really liked the idea of the Independent, but it hasn't worked out - just a vaguely centrist but government-criticial paper.

Quote of the day from SirKeir:

"Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arms-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be"

https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/2000594550599864781

If only he was the PM with a large majority, who might be in a position to actually do something about the regulatory and bureaucratic overload?

Ukraine starting to lose German and French voter support which is pretty concerning. I suspect we shall get a bad peace deal in 2026, which will give the global economy a temporary boost but at the expense of emboldening Putin and might is right generally.

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-and-germans-lean-toward-dialing-back-ukraine-support-new-international-politico-poll-shows/

I suspect that's partly because the main promotors of supporting Ukraine in the respective countries are two very unpopular politicians, Macron and Merz. Like Starmer Merz is even less popular than his predecessor.

By that logic the UK should be very anti supporting Ukraine.

The difference is that Ukraine has cross party support in the UK - I guess we can thank Boris Johnson for that - while Merz is out on a limb. What he promotes is tainted by association.