I love my accountant. Truly. His name pops into my inbox at around this time every year and I feel a surge of calm. He will look after me, I think. He will do the sums and the form-filling and ensure my tax return is filed on time. I imagine him fighting various epic battles in my name, like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, defending me against the rampant might of the HMRC grizzly bear.
My accountant has many qualities. However, being a “personality” is the one thing I am grateful he is not. In truth, I’ve never met him. We conduct our business by email. The whole personality thing is over-rated, anyway. There’d be nothing more annoying than missing the deadline for filing your tax return because your accountant’s too busy doing jazz hands and trying to remember the punchline for a knock-knock joke.
I raise the personality issue because of Jim Harra. He is HMRC’s director-general of business tax. He was one of the civil servants behind the negotiation of Google’s tax deal with the government, which saw the corporation pay 25p and a packet of fizzy cola bottles to the Treasury.
Last week, Harra took to the airwaves to insist that the authorities had negotiated the best possible deal, as he would. But this is not a column about the iniquities of the deal — no I’m more interested in an interview with Radio 4’s The World at One, during which it was revealed, almost in passing, that Harra had been named Tax Personality of the Year for 2015.
Yes, you read that correctly. A swift internet search (yep, I used Google) revealed that the honour was bestowed at something called the Taxation Awards, where a “Platinum” table cost £3,300 plus VAT.
The Taxation Awards website has photographs of a lot of rather surprised-looking individuals clutching statuettes in an anonymous hotel, alongside The Observer’s very own Mariella Frostrup. There are helpful tips on how to enter. Sticking to the word count for supporting statements is key: apparently, last year someone submitted their entry with a 60-page appendix.
But why bother with an award for Tax Personality of the Year in the first place? Isn’t it more important that the people in HMRC are just good at their job? Being a “personality” is no guarantee that the individual in question is particularly effective in a professional capacity.
In many cases, quite the opposite is true. We’ve all been stuck in offices with the self-appointed joker (the kind of individual who goes around saying: “I’m mad, me,” and has a humorous desk toy next to their stapler) and we know they’re difficult to manage and irritating to work with.
Yet we exist in a culture that increasingly rewards personality rather than character, that prizes fame over achievement. In politics, MPs are constantly encouraged to have a personal narrative in order to connect with voters.
On reality television, the contestants who create the most drama are the ones who win. The bestseller lists are rammed with celebrity autobiographies, their subjects ever more desperate to share the uniqueness of their personal stories. And every year, the BBC trots out the Sports Personality of the Year trophy, as if being personable is somehow more important than being good at, well, sport.
Personality loses its appeal when it has to be cultivated. It’s a different thing from simply being good company. You can be brilliant at your job without being the zany conversationalist in the pub after work. And if you’re trying too hard to be exceptional, you’re probably not that great at focusing on the matters in hand: namely, the timely completion of my tax return.
Quite frankly, I don’t need my accountant to be Joey Essex.
Puts the new Barbies in the shade
You know how it is. You want to take your haunted doll on to the plane and then the air hostess insists you have to treat it as carry-on and you’re all, like: “But this doll has been blessed by a monk and is inhabited by a wandering soul and it requires refreshments and a seat like any other human being.”
I mean. Another day, same problem, right? Or maybe not.
Just occasionally, I read a news story so demented I’m left questioning whether I’m the weird one for not understanding it. Last week, I was introduced to the concept of “luk thep” – lifelike dolls in Thailand referred to as “child angels” – which are pampered by their owners as if they are real family members.
After purchasing a doll for anything up to £600, the owner takes it to a monk who conducts a prayer in order to invite a spirit to inhabit its plastic form and give it a soul. The luk thep is then believed to bring its owner good fortune. I promise I’m not making this up. In Thailand, there are restaurants that offer special luk thep rates on the menu.
And a few days ago, Thai Smile Airways announced that passengers were now permitted to buy plane tickets for their dolls so that owners could travel next to them when they fly.
The Thai Civil Aviation Authority then issued a clarification on the matter, stating sensibly: “Passengers are people.”
At first glance, this all seems extremely strange. But having been on more than my fair share of long-haul flights sitting next to screaming, real-life babies, there is part of me that would welcome sharing an economy row with a luk thep.
No unwanted conversation, plenty of legroom and the chance to get an extra bread roll.
In many ways, they could be the perfect passenger.
So, no more any questions with Shirley Williams
So, farewell then, Shirley Williams. The redoubtable baroness has just retired from the House of Lords after 50 years in politics. During that time, I’ve been lucky enough to interview her on four occasions, which is the most I’ve ever interviewed anybody. With Baroness Williams, I never once ran out of questions.
She was always so eloquent, but sometimes it was hard to keep the interview on track because she was so keen to ask questions back.
The last time we met, we talked over a toasted teacake in the House of Lords about her great friend the late Denis Healey for a tribute piece in the New Review. Soon, she had winkled out of me the fact that I’d spent some time in Los Angeles and immediately wanted to know what I thought about the American elections and why people there had such a problem with guns.
It was disarming being asked my opinion by someone with such a sharp brain who had spent a lifetime analysing these matters. Yet she never once made me feel any less than her equal. I left every encounter feeling she was always more interested in other people than herself. That restless curiosity is a rare and lovely quality. Politics – and the world in general – needs more of it.
