Last updated 11:42, Tuesday, 08 July 2008

I’ve never been able to work out what it is about consultants that makes grown men, women – and far too many elected politicians – agree wholeheartedly to purchase expensively presented suggestions that they should tie their own blindfolds and leap into the abyss.

Gordon Brown: Urges families to think before they buy food

Consultants, you may recall, are those faceless suits renowned for stealing your watch to tell you the time – then charging a fortune for favour of daylight robbery.

The grandest of the breed call themselves advisers, aides or even think-tanks – they steal bigger, more precious watches than the rest. But however they’re labelled, their effect is the same.

They render intelligent individuals witless, clueless and enslaved to bad ideas which end up being implemented only because they’ve been bought and paid for – and it would be an awful waste not to.

Consultants I blame for Gordon Brown’s “Waste not want not” message.

It’s doubtful he has suddenly taken to watching Doris Day films, spontaneously fancied 21st century Britain as a rerun of 1950s Good Housekeeping or even taken an uncharacteristic interest in the contents of his fridge.

A man who dines five times a day on fingernails doesn’t suddenly develop a passion for leftovers.

No, some think-tank consultancy will have advised him the average household throws away £400 a year in binned food and the solution to the world’s frighteningly rising food prices is to blame the consumer for unwise shopping, sloppy kitchen management and the cooking skills of a goldfish.

Never mind soaring oil costs – which force every price skywards – global economy in meltdown and the supermarket superpower domination by bogof – which will have been another deep thinker’s brainwave, no doubt.

Wouldn’t half price have made more conserving sense than two for the price of one?

Never mind all that. It’s our fault... again. And we, angered by being blamed anew for circumstances beyond our control, will shoot the messenger who is obviously a nincompoop and not of the real world – which is only partly true.

He’s a nincompoop who pays other people to do his thinking for him. And that, unfortunately, is increasingly of the real world.

Other messengers being shot this week are closer to home than Gordon Brown – who’s in Japan with his advisers having his watch stolen at the minute. Councillors in Carlisle are taking the flak for a consultancy’s proposal – drawn up for the county council – that car parking charges in the city should rise to around £20 a day to force car users off the road and onto bus routes.

It’s unfortunate that in hearing alarms bells of stupidity approaching, details of angry council objection have been lost somewhere in delivery. But councillors did object.

They do object to a plan already proven to be costly, ineffective and ultimately a knife in the back of Carlisle’s Renaissance aspirations.

The consultancy proposal follows a familiar form of blame. The reason Carlisle is choked by traffic (is it really?) is our fault. We’re not using the buses that aren’t there for us (services are being axed) and we’re expecting to be able to park our cars in the centre (since drive-through shopping isn’t yet an option).

To make us use park and ride buses (that don’t and can’t exist because our roads are too narrow for bus lanes) we’ll be stung by eye-watering parking charges and eventually there’ll be no traffic in Carlisle, no people or businesses in Carlisle, no Carlisle... and that will be our fault again for not being able to afford it.

We’ll have to make do with out of town shopping centres and bogof supermarkets. Deal done.

See? The watch is stolen, the time is well and truly told and when Carlisle’s councillors heard the tick-tock they were rightly outraged, dismissing the whole scenario as a suicidal plan akin to leaping blindfold into the abyss.

So, don’t be too ready to shoot the wrong messengers.

Good for them for recognising departure from the real world. Well done them for realising the needs of their city.

But there’s a point these elected ladies and gents might want to bear in mind for the future.

Do you not think you might be giving away all our watches when you employ distant consultants to do your thinking for you?

It’s an awful lot cheaper – and most often wiser – to do your thinking for yourselves. Which is perhaps why we entrusted you with our vote.