Obiter was intrigued by an insight into the workings of the Crown Prosecution Service, gleaned from an article in last week’s Guardian about the futility of meetings. A CPS ‘senior manager’ who (wisely) asked not to be named, is quoted as saying: ‘Don’t go to meetings… They are torture unless you are leading or chairing, and even then they are stressful. No successful decision has ever been made in a meeting. They are always revisited afterwards, either by people who weren’t there, or who were there but didn’t say anything and then nobbled someone outside the meeting.’ When he is chairing meetings that will become public, the article says, the CPS manager admits to making sure ‘everything important is decided beforehand’, and he arranges for ‘puppets to repeat the arguments for the record’. Redundant layers of procedure and ineffective decision-making at a government organisation. Whoever would have thought it?