Public Sector Situations Vacant
Pocket Monitoring Officer
The Blessed Authority has another temporary vacancy for an Office Monitor a Monitoring Officer, starting immediately and ending sooner than you think.
As the eighth holder of this office in as many years, your principal role will be to invent legal-sounding justifications for improper, unreasonable and unlawful actions on a daily basis, including:
- circumventing consultation processes
- siphoning ring-fenced funds to avoid difficult decisions
- refusing freedom of information requests
- redacting documents which don’t say what you said they did
You will also be responsible for the burying, re-writing or sanitisation of “independent” reports into Blessed behaviour, following the Pikeman Principle of re-assuring members that there is nothing to see here. You will be amazed at how easily members are impressed by the words “legal opinion” and “officers are doing an excellent job under difficult circumstances”.
Your “monitoring” duties will of course mostly involve monitoring the activities of members (usually the ones appointed by local authorities, though the occasional Secretary of State appointee has been known to go native), and you will be expected to maintain dossiers on their social media profiles and any public comments which could draw unwanted attention to the Authority’s hapless incompetence.
This work will include a quarterly review of “constitutional documents”, enabling the rapid re-classification of activities as breaches of the code of conduct or conflicts of interest, at the personal whim of the Chairpuppet, Dick Bilson.
But perhaps your most challenging responsibility will be the defence of the Pikeman Paradox, which allows lawful activities to be re-branded as unlawful, according to who is doing it. A giant and highly visible riverside tent can, for example, be erected for 6 years without planning consent because it is “Blessed” as a temporary structure, whilst small yurts in nature reserves or campsites are classed as permanent buildings. You will probably spend hundreds of hours researching archaic justifications for this complex principle, before realising that “because I say so” works just as well with the members.
Salary: £20,000 - this is the figure reported to members but will be consumed in the first month. Additional hours will be sub-contracted to a third-party providing “specialist technical advice” at 5 times your hourly rate, before he becomes your successor.
Pre-requisities: broken moral compass, short-term memory of a goldfish, ability to sleep with eyes open.
As a Pocket MO, you will quickly be welcomed to the UK’s fastest growing professional association, the Blessed Authority’s Dispirited Society of Ex-Governance and Monitoring Experts (BADSEXGAME).
Please send your CV and candid photos (to ensure that you can never speak of what you learn) to poorcareermoves@the-broads-is-not-a-national-park.etc
