20 January 2016, 12.30 pm
I go for lunch with Unlucky Gary. I want to ask him what Mr Davies is up to these days, but it turns out he doesn’t know either. We think it may be something to do with the revised updated Strategic Plan. But we did hear the sound of a kettle boiling earlier, which is a concern. 20 January 2016, 1.30 pm Now I am at a meeting of the Regulatory Affairs Committee. It used to be called the Regulatory Responses Committee, but it got fed up of being passive, so then it briefly became the Regulatory Answering Back Committee before deciding that actually, forget being there at other people’s beck and call, let’s do Affairs, which are far more dashing and derring. The Committee’s first job is to decide how it would like to conduct its regulatory Affairs. It plans to draft a CIPA regulatory strategy and a CIPA regulatory position paper, and then ask Mr Davies to revise and update them both. Mr Davies lifts his head out of the kettle and says No Way. I remind everyone in the room that it matters little what CIPA puts in its regulatory anything, because the people in charge of regulation are not exactly rushing to ask CIPA how to do it. Still, everyone says, we ought to know what we would want out of regulation in an ideal world. Which is kind of like me knowing what I would want out of the CIPA Presidency in an ideal world. Next we talk about the process for appointing the new IPReg Chair. IPReg have designed a process. They said to CIPA: here’s the process we designed. CIPA interpreted this to mean: please tell us what you think of the process we designed. This was CIPA’s first mistake. CIPA’s second mistake was writing to IPReg setting out what it thought of the process they’d designed. IPReg considered this for a while, and then wrote to CIPA saying, essentially: we did not ask you what you thought of it; we are doing it anyway. Now the Regulatory Affairs Committee has a dilemma. Option one is the namby-pamby one advocated by – you’ve guessed it – the CIPA Pee. It involves letting go and moving on (or, in the eyes of my colleagues, backing down and wimping out), because the design is not that bad and no one is going to die as a result of it and if we write back to IPReg saying You are stupid not to listen to us and your design is stupid too, that will be our third mistake. In a few weeks’ time we have got to sit down with IPReg and start interviewing candidates, and it would look bad if the two halves of the interviewing panel sat with their backs to each other. Option two is the standard CIPA approach. It involves – you’ve guessed it – writing back to IPReg saying You are stupid not to listen to us and your design is stupid too, and we demand that this outrage cease forthwith or we will – we will – er, we will sit with our backs to you on the interviewing panel. I am, of course, outvoted. I am told to draft a rude letter, of the type that anyone would be proud to receive from their worst enemy at the start of an important appointment procedure. The others will help me make it rude enough. I am not to send it until they have done so.
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