Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Political Trumps

The TaxPayers' Alliance have produced Political Trumps. 54 major contemporary politicians are rated on a series of criteria: Media Skills, Integrity, Scandal Avoidance, Length of Ministerial Service, Years per Department and Private Sector Experience.

You can play Top Trumps with them, comparing ranks and trying to win the most. Or, you can play ordinary card games with them; they have the required suits and ranks.

Either way is a much more constructive use of your time than playing the real political game: Brag. Politicians with little or no management and subject experience pretend they're able to do what even the most seasoned and expert manager could not: run an organisation the size of a central government department like the NHS, with 1.3 million staff and a budget of billions. Everyone loses unless the public call them on it.

You can order yourself a set of Political Trumps here.

3 comments:

Gracchi said...

Matt just thought I'd ask a mean question! You include private sector experience and obviously that is relevant to managing large organisations like the NHS. But you don't include public sector experience or the website doesn't mention it. So someone like say Patrick Mercer (former soldier) or David Howarth (former law lecturer at Cambridge) who both have long public sector experience, relevant to doing a ministerial job, would be given no points on experience. I was wondering whether you could justify that.

Matthew Sinclair said...

Private sector experience was the closest we could come to a proxy for management experience. I agree that it is an impefect proxy.

chris said...

Just wondering, who gets the ace of spades?