WRITTEN ON March 10th, 2008 BY Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom GCMG KCVO AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Sir Bonar writes:

Paid a quick visit to the Tower this morning to kick off a Transformative Government conference. I restricted my own role to chairing the 0730 meeting of chairmen and keynote speakers. I decided with some reluctance against giving my famous “five C’s” speech this year, even though it is invariably well received. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.

We agreed the new Cabinet Office Minister should do his Interweb talk. I had a chat with Tom, who is a fellow blogger. I must put Patricia in touch with his secretary to share some technical tips on posting. He’s also a fellow Ear-Podder. I played him von Karajan’s 1983 Ring Cycle on mine. I think he complained he had jam on his, but I couldn’t see any.

We all agreed the most important thing was to exemplify the fact that we are on top of everything and that that we are the ones who “Get it”, along with our supplier partners such as Fujitsu who generously sponsored this event and the after dinner drinks. We shouldn’t underestimate the capability of our sponsoring partners. A firm such as Lockheed Martin can help us to deliver the payload of public services with pinpoint accuracy. That’s what they do: accurately and affordably. I reminded everyone to make sure they thanked our many other sponsors for their support.

I’m strongly in favour of this very sensible plan to close down 500 web sites. It’s a bit much to ask even the unemployed to visit 500 different government web sites, let alone those with proper jobs. It makes our message appear fragmented. Far better to make it just one. Apart form anything else running just one web site instead of 500 must mean a tremendous saving in electricity. One can’t be too conscious of such things in this increasingly “green” age of climate change, of which the effects are to be seen everywhere. I’ve observed for myself the effects at first hand: this promises to be an excellent season for F Meleagrii, but my own 2008 vintage is some fifteen days earlier than that of 10 years ago.

We agreed to throw in a few vox populi. We used films of people sitting about moaning about local government. One has to do that to show commitment to Customer insight, to which no-one surpasses me in my personal enthusiasm. Anyway, having agreed the broad thrust of our messages I took the car back to the office for some real work in the form of 16 back-to-back meetings. We have an urgent leak enquiry about some naughty filly called Civil Serf.