Something Has Gone Wrong by Steve Ramsey

Author:Steve Ramsey [Steve Ramsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903434
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

For Geoffrey Pattie, junior minister at the DTI, the situation felt basically normal, though ‘probably a bit more vicarious’. More of the communication was done by memos sent back and forth.

‘If Norman had been alright,’ he says,

what would have been happening is that we would have been having more of those discussions face to face. Because Callum would ring up and say, ‘Secretary of State is wondering if you could meet at twelve o’clock to discuss the XYZ project’, and we’d all look at our diaries and try and get there. Well, that wasn’t an option.

And, I mean, it’s a huge credit to Callum that it was all as good as it was. Because you felt you were almost dealing with the Secretary of State. It’s simply that, you’ll know what I mean by interactive, if you haven’t got the interactive element, if you’re actually doing a sort of slow ping-pong game really, where Callum says, ‘Secretary of State thinks this’, and then you say, ‘Well, I’m not sure he’s totally right because if you go back, you’ll find that…’ I mean that can take a day and a half, whereas it could have been sharply argued out in ten minutes.

Whereas you would have almost put your head round the door, in the past, and said, ‘Do you think we ought to do this?’ If you can’t do that, you’re then in a situation where you’re having to slightly codify your thoughts, put down paragraphs and things. It’s got a different rhythm to it. It’s the difference between dealing with somebody who you’re not seeing very often but who you know well and like, through an intermediary, or talking to them face to face.

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