Zimbabwe, Simon Cowell, Iran, GCSE physics papers, the ‘sycophancy of financial journalists’, Europe – always Europe – unit trusts, Oxfam... it would be easier to list the things that DON’T make David Craig angry than those which do.
At least that’s the impression you get from his entertaining blog, a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin affair entitled Snouts In The Trough. It’s a mixture of fact, comment and blistering vitriol sprayed over everything and everyone who has got his goat that week.
Add to this the fact that he’s written and published eight well-received books in similar vein, with titles ranging from Rip-Off, Squandered, Fleeced, The Great European Rip-Off (David loves to expose a rip-off), Pillaged and his latest, Greed Unlimited, and you get the – extremely furious – picture.
So you could have knocked me down with an MP’s expenses form when I arrived at his penthouse apartment to find that not only is it an oasis of zen-like calm, with views over the Bournemouth tree-tops, he is not navy-blue with rage but, rather, is a softly-spoken Scot sporting a very mahogany tan.
“I was an elected governor of Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospital,” he says, explaining that he was contacted by ‘a whistleblower’ who made claims about the cost of the hospital car-park.
To cut a long story short he claims he was informed when he started looking into it that none of this was anything to do with his position as an elected governor and so he resigned. (In a Daily Echo report at the time, Chief executive Tony Spotswood told him he should ‘work within the auspices of the role defined for a governor’ and said:“I don’t believe anything further will be gained from continuing our correspondence on this matter.”)
But that wasn’t the start of David’s serial boat-rocking which commenced after he arrived back in New Labour’s Britain after 20 years as a management consultant working in Denmark where he has two adopted children from his first marriage.
“I got a bit disillusioned with what we were doing because to me, consultancy had become a body factory,” he says.
“Consultants work on the process of ‘eating what you kill’ so each of the vice presidents gets his bonus on how much he can sell.”
So David wrote a book.
Plundering the Public Sector told the story of ‘How New Labour are letting consultants run off with £70 billion of our money.’
“Seeing all that money wasted got me interested in politics, at the time people said, believe it or not, that Gordon Brown was an economic genius,” he chortles.
“I looked at it from a consultant’s view of Britain and said this is complete rubbish, and so I did a book which was ground-breaking at the time, the first one that revealed he was a complete buffoon.”
The critics loved him. “Read this and weep,” instructed the respected BBC and Sky journalist, Jeff Randall. But the consultancy community did not.
“That was pretty much the end of my career as a consultant, I was blacklisted by all the consultancy firms,” says David.
But what did he care, now he had established a new career as a writer? His works came fast and furious with no department, organisation, or incompetent bureaucracy un-flayed, and the early ones sold well.
His dedication even ran to paying to publish one tome, Who Cares, so convinced was he that the appalling tale of neglect towards NHS patient Paul Stearne should be told.
Despite this, however, he insists there isn’t one thing which infuriates him above all others, no apocalyptic incidence of incompetency or waste.
“It’s the total incompetence and the lies,” he says.
“We have a new bureaucratic class who are in a club of their own and they are not afraid of us. There is a complete loss of morality throughout Britain.”
But the thing which most taxes his patience these days is the fact that not enough people are buying his books, a fact he mentions incessantly on his blog, and it’s made him want to quit publishing.
“What’s depressed me is that just 130 people have bought Greed Unlimited, it’s disgraceful!” he says.
“I have 400 people a day go to my website and read my blog and I repeatedly ask if they could buy the book to help pay for it all.”
Maybe it’s all too depressing but it shouldn’t be because, he says, there is a way out.
His ‘Recipe for reform’ comprises 18 things we need to do to wipe out the deficit. It includes putting all public sector managers on a four-day week; “They are, anyway,” and paying them one-fifth less.
As for him; “I’ve done my bit,” he says.
“If people are going to complain they’ve got to make an effort.”
- Greed Unlimited is available from Amazon or snouts-in-the-trough.com
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