What Ho, Jeeves!

THAT FOUNT of all knowledge, the Mate In The Pub, suddenly announced last night that 50 per cent of the total working UK population was now in the direct employ of the government, either in the public sector or in private companies employed by the public sector. He also reckoned that the working population of the UK is around 20 million people. So that’s 10 million people in the ranks of the Turkey Army and 10 million of the rest of us without (without pensions, mainly).

Now this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it make sense to give each of us private sector wealth-generators our own, personal public servant? A sort of Jeeves character, although obviously a lot more common?

They could just follow us around doing all the essential but annoying things we don’t enjoy, like taking our household refuse to the rubbish tip, cooking us healthy, five-a-day food, nagging us when we smoke or drink, filling the potholes in the road on our way to work, and advising us on safe sex as we stagger out of nightclubs because they’re going to have to deliver the resultant baby and then teach it for 18 years.

In fact, all the things our local authorities should be doing in exchange for our council tax but patently don’t. And we’d pay Jeeves direct, instead of coughing up ever increasing amounts to the council to fund advertisements for one-legged, black, bicycling outreach workers in the Guardian.

And another thing: this sort of thing would wipe out the problem of benefits cheats at a stroke, as there simply wouldn't be any. They couldn’t get away with not working, or pretending to work, as we’d notice straight away and grass them up to the Jeeves Police who’d ship them off to camps for corrective training.

You know, I think we’re on to something here.

WITH THE football season reaching such a busy stage, Mrs Beelzebub has been deputed to decorate the master bedroom suite. Nothing major – bedroom, dressing room (his), dressing room (hers), bathroom, observatory and terrace with hot tub.

Because of her arthritis (a condition she carelessly exacerbated when moving the four-poster bed) Mrs Beelzebub struggles a bit with those big paint rollers, so I sent her off to DIY store Homebase to treat herself to a small one. She returned having spent a rather extravagant £5.49 and set to.

One small problem: the roller, once assembled, wouldn’t fit in the paint tray. It was a classic of useless design. Not even the Irish could have come up with this one.

Back to Homebase she went, where the giggling nincompoop on the returns desk wiped her nose on her sleeve and said: “Oh, yes. We’ve had a few of those brought back. The roller doesn’t fit in the paint tray.”

And over what time period, Mrs Beelzebub enquired, had these faulty items been returned? “Ooh, a couple of weeks, now,” snuffled the be-fleeced phlegm monster.

Mrs Beelzebub then asked, quite correctly, why the useless product was still on the shelves, causing inconvenience and irritation to everyone who bought it?

“Ooh, I don’t know,” giggled the minimum-wage idiot.

You see, that’s what’s wrong with this country. All it needed was for someone with a bit of gumption to drag the manager away from watching pornography on his office computer to tell him that his shelves were stocked with an item that was not only unusable, but the purchase of which would annoy anyone foolish enough to buy it.

He could then send the damn things back to China (where the children who assembled them would no doubt have their wages docked) and everyone’s happy. Instead stupidity and indolence rules, dozens of wasted carbon-emitting journeys to the DIY store are made and several polar bears drown as a result. I hope they’re pleased with themselves.

If it was me, I’d have had the manager either refund my petrol money or pop outside to be introduced to my new, on-board baseball bat. Or I’d have sent my Jeeves in the first place.

WE HAVE a splendid high-speed dual carriageway in our neighbourhood, linking two motorways in a really efficient manner. One afternoon last week there was a nasty car crash involving two vehicles travelling in opposing directions on the same side of the carriageway.

Not pleasant. Both drivers dead, no passengers involved, yet still the cops saw fit to close this vital link road for EIGHT HOURS. No, really.

I know that they now consider fatal accidents to be crime scenes as they try to pin the blame on one driver or another (must get those targets met) but in this case there was no point in spending hour after hour trying to establish blame. You can’t haul a dead man through the courts, after all. You can’t give three points to a corpse.

All that was needed was a cursory examination of the scene to keep the Coroner happy, and then it should have been a case of “wagons roll”. The cost to the economy, in the middle of a busy week, is almost unquantifiable. And we won’t even mention the succession of accidents which left several people injured as HGVs rampaged through the villages unfortunate enough to be on the diversion route.

Perhaps it’s time we each had our own personal policeman; someone to focus on our personal concerns and protect our own property. I shall call mine Dixon.