I’ve long had a theory – despite knowing many clever and nice people who work in the sector – that consultancy firms don’t have a scooby-doo what they’re doing. They radiate immense power and authority as brands, they are fluent in corporate bull-pucky, and they charge truly obscene fees but I suspect their main superpower is getting someone to the C-suite to spend a lot of the company’s money on telling the company what it wants to hear.

I mean, in the first place, isn’t it the job of those people in the C-suite to manage stuff themselves? Aren’t they being paid, usually quite well, to be managers? If they need a flock of teenagers in clipboards on whatever it is per hour to sign off on their decisions, they aren’t doing their jobs, right? Yet, runs this theory, if they want to fire half the staff, they feel much safer doing so if they’ve invited CamelCaseGlobalStrategies to write a 1,200-page report first. 

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Then it’s not just you being a bastard (and being firmly on the hook for the consequences if the share price goes south): it’s you leveraging the iterative solution-based praxis of CamelCase. It’s practically scientific. They have letterheads and everything. And if this report, with all its graphs and flowcharts, costs a small fortune, so be it: it’s not your money, personally, and if it makes a hole in the company’s budget that’s — eureka! – easily made good by firing half the staff.

So it’s with a certain amount of head-shaking that I read reports yesterday of Labour activists’ quite obscene dirty-tricks campaign against a pair of Sunday Times hacks, Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke. Keir Starmer’s Labour was brought to power with the help of an activist........

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