Grumbles from the Pulpit: That was the Week that Was!

Looking back at the week!

French trifles.

At the annual Normandy Summit in Caen, the Minister for External Relations was joined by representatives from Normandy, La Manche, and Guernsey, including the President of the Normandy region, Hervé Morin, the President of La Manche, Jean Morin, and Guernsey’s External Affairs Minister, Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq. The Chief Minister, Deputy Kristina Moore, joined remotely from Jersey.

Philip Ozouf got some critical comments for being physically present. I disagree with that criticism. . I've been recently looking at a practice management system, and the preliminary meetings showed us the system using Teams. The recent one took place in our boardroom - all kind of nuances from body language and the ease to put in questions (and get them answered) and the ability hence to interact far better is when you are present rather than face to face. It also allows, in the case of Philip Ozouf, for more general ex-meeting social chit chat which can also help political relationships with others. That behind the scenes work can also help the official meetings. Face to face also means you can easily see all the expressions on people, and react far better to circumstances.

Meteoric!

The Orionids are back! Shooting stars are debris from comets - Halley's comet in this case with the Orionids, and often no larger than toner dust to grains of sand. Their speed is huge, but if you put it as miles per second, average is 40 miles per second, which is roughly the distance from St Catherine's Breakwater to St Anne's Alderney - covered in one second! Beats rush hour traffic!

Covid cases.

School cases are not currently being updated on a weekly basis. But here's the results from an FOI.

Political Apologies

And finally, I saw Gavin St Pier's piece in the Friday JEP  had "Liz Truss, who is Prime Minister at the time this piece was written." But he raises an interesting point: when do politicians apologise for U-Turns or just getting it wrong? I can think of very few. John Rothwell apologised (and was in tears) over the Beauport potato dump fiasco. Philip Ozouf did apologise over breaking a promise not to raise GST to 5% from 3%. But plenty didn't.

Alan Maclean over the £200,000 given to a bogus film company
Terry le Sueur over the golden handshake given to Bill Ogley
Terry Le Main over breaking Data Protection rules
Members of the States Employment board for persistently ignoring the Complains Committee's review of cases.
Andrew Lewis for lying to the States, the Care Inquiry and PPC.
And I'm sure you could add many more.