David's Digest

I note that Mr Tony Cooper has recently been appointed boss of the Rural Payments Agency - a job he has been doing without the official title for two years. Can this be a reward for the fact that there are still Single Farm Payment cases unresolved for three years? That there are still underpayments, over payments, partial payments, disputes about maps and so on, some of which date back to the start of the scheme?

If Mr Cooper was really good enough to have his appointment confirmed wouldn't he have sorted out all the historical anomalies by now? And wouldn't he be confident enough to promise that this years payments would be issued by the end of the year rather than hoping they might be paid early in the New Year? 

Poor show that all this is, the truly guilty ones are those who dreamed up such a complicated system in the first place - the top civil servants of Defra led by Mrs Margaret Beckett who has driven off in her luxury caravan into the sunset of her political career with a whopping pension without so much as a backward glance.