(Planning per)mission Impossible

I will start with a confession: I LOVE a good spy story! There is something terribly romantic about the clandestine world of shadowy creatures eavesdropping on conversations or getting information that no-one else knows. The disguises and secret meetings to hand over the intelligence to the handler and the dramatic escapes. And then of course the wonderful stories of how they get away with it!

So you can imagine my utter delight when I read about two Chinese spy’s being arrested IN Parliament. I had images of some shady characters infiltrating the Palace of Westminster with fake moustaches and dodgy IDs and tense moments where their passes had to be checked by the computer system and their fake information worked and the gates flew open.

Imagine my disappointment when I found out that one of them was actually called Chris Cash… "The name is Cash, Chris Cash" (try and say it out loud a few times quickly, it is a right tongue twister).

Ok, so now you have said Chrish Crash a few times, FOCUS! The first rule of being a good spy is you should always be focussed, or you will end up in concrete boots at the bottom of the Thames.

What would you do if you were a spy and what would you spy on?

I am a bit of a geek… I would spy on Councillors and the Planning Departments. Now, as many of you will know, I was a Councillor for many years myself and I was quite often (almost always) completely mystified by some (most) of the decision making. Doing this job I realised that it wasn’t just the Council where I served that mystified me, all Councils occasionally (very frequently) mystify and bewilder me with their decision making.

I would love to be able to tap their phones and read their e-mails and bug their meeting rooms to hear the thinking process behind some of the decisions. I honestly sometimes don’t even know who is steering the decision-making process… is it officers or is it Councillors? And at what point does someone make a questionable suggestion that then becomes a decision. What is that thinking process? How do they come to that conclusion?

Naturally a lot of it comes down to public opinion, the world is largely governed by social media reaction these days (it used to be the daily newspapers but their influence has been vastly reduced). So decisions are made and again unmade (aka u-turns) on the reaction by the public. I suspect some of these decisions are made to pre-empt adverse publicity. But that can’t explain it all.

I have a desire to see and hear the thinking and then pass that information on. I want to shine a nice big, bright light on it as I lift the stones to see what is going on.

Anyway, for the public record, our company is called The CCP… it is the Community Communications Partnership and NOT the Chinese Communist Party!

Until next week,

Henry