Tory Party Strategy Sessions

The way I learned to develop strategy is to do what's called a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Those attending the SWOT session are allowed to articulate whatever they want under the above headings without criticism, providing the ideas are targeted at the company mission. The criticism comes later, as sometimes some really innovative ideas can manifest themselves but can get slapped down before they're even analysed properly.

What usually happens is that you start with a host of strengths and opportunities and few weakness and threats. However, on investigating and sanity testing the opportunities they invariably haven't already been taken advantage of because of inherent weaknesses within the organisation, or missing strengths, and you end up with a shed-load of weaknesses.

It strikes me that the Tory Party strategists have done the SWOT but haven't sanity tested any of the madcap opportunities. Someone has walked in during a break, spotted the flip chart with all the opportunities, taken a photo of it and forwarded it to the communications department for immediate release.

Either that, or they're just putting out any old crap in the hope of reducing the hammering they're going to get, knowing full well they'll never be called upon to implement the mad-cap ideas.

A war on woke Arts degrees (I thought we had a world-class film industry); apprenticeships (when at least half of them, especially in retail and hospitality, are used by companies for cheap labour and don't result in jobs); putting youngsters into National Service (against the recommendations of those actually in uniform who say they can't be trained or housed on the budget the Cons are spouting); tax cuts (when we can't afford them), etc.