How to be Chancellor
HOLIDAY task for the Treasury and City, set by Kenneth Clarke: read Gerald Kauf- man's How to be a Minister. When Brian Sedgmore and Diane Abbott, in a spirit of impartial inquiry, asked the new Chancellor what he thought his job was and what min- isters and mandarins were for, he referred them to this work, the fruit of years as a Labour minister and before that as Harold Wilson's bag-carrier. 'It is better,' Kaufman teaches, `to make your own mistakes than someone else's.' (Mr Clarke's predecessor is now trying to explain that his mistakes were someone else's.) Better, but not always easier. There is the Treasury, a lion in the departmental way, to be appeased or bypassed. There is the helpful brief begin- ning: 'The Minister will wish to say . . .' Not wishing to say any such thing, the minister may find that the brief has been drafted in the Treasury. There is the equally helpful brief that provoked another minister to cry, 'I wish they'd tell me what to do, instead of giving me both sides of the argument!' He can always put his brief in his briefcase, where private secretaries carry Ed McBain novels, press officers the Daily Mail, and permanent secretaries the collected works of Ossian. How to be a Minister is out of print and scarce. The author himself has no copy, and the London School of Economics and Political Science's library copy is miss- ing, believed pinched. Clue: ask a friend in the Treasury, nicely. Kaufman makes a change from Ed McBain.
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