Ps and Qs

'My names Paquet. Jean-Eric Paquet'
(Photo by David Sinclair on Unsplash)

While the UK political class implodes and SS Great Britain steams with grim determination towards the Brexit iceberg, DG Research has other priorities. Yes, it's time for a reorganisation.

Long-term readers will remember, back in the heady days of January 2016, DG Research 'realigned' towards the three 'O's principle. We all applauded, as no-one likes a good random letter reorganisation like Fundermentals.

Well, imagine our delight when we learnt that, for the new reorganisation, DG Research has moved on to the letter P. The current current thematic directorates (e.g. Health, Energy, Transport, etc.) will be renamed as 'People', 'Planet' and 'Prosperity'.

This is wonderful. Our ardour for policy directives based entirely on alliteration remains unabated. We can only hope that Jean-Eric Paquet shares our love of seventies chocolate bar advertising and will include a directorate for 'Ppppeckish', 'Ppppicking up of' and 'Ppppenguins'.

As if that wasn't enough, Paquet has gone all Bourne Identity and plans to incorporate sexy spy names into the Directorate General. So there'll be a 'Missions and Partnerships' unit, to be led by Tom Cruise (possibly), within a 'programming centre', with a black ops 'EIC Task Force', comprising 'pathfinders' and 'accelerators'.

Which, of course, brings to mind Q. It's the next natural step after the 'O' and 'P' reorganisations. It was clearly in Paquet's mind all along: he's always loved gadgets. Just a shame it took him 16 alliterative reorganisations to get there.