Holmes as leader of the Council

The appointment of Sherlock Holmes as Leader of the Council has been an inspired one. Whereas we received a Continuous Performance Assessment of ‘weak in most areas’ three years ago, we have since been upgraded to ‘a notably strong performer.’ He has achieved this by the absolute application of logic to every problem or crisis the Council has faced. He has ensured that every elected member and chief officer has been trained in what he calls ‘his methods’ and he has insisted that everyone has applied them. I am his business manager, and have had the honour of assisting him in his successes. I have also helped him out of his many sloughs of despond, when his decisions were being examined critically by a Scrutiny panel. He would lie about with his violin and his committee papers, hardly moving, save from the office sofa to the table. ‘These fools, Watters,’ he would remark, ‘What do they know of such matters? How can they question the decisions of Sherlock Holmes, the man who rid London of the notoriously evil Professor James Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran?’
‘It’s only a planning application,’ I would say, ‘It’s not as if it’s a scandal in Bohemia, or anything like that.’ He would be temporarily appeased. On matters of the allocation of resources, Holmes was white-hot.
‘Kindly pass me those budget papers, Watters,’ he would say, ‘and from my commonplace book on the second shelf, that list of budget folio codes.’ He would bHe would eventually be appeased.He would pore over these for hours, before straightening up, throwing down his pen and exclaiming in satisfaction. ‘I thought so, Watters. This allocation is quite bogus. It doesn’t exist. This sum of money was to have been converted for nefarious use. It is a trifling matter, but not without interest.’
He also uncovered the bogus invoice scam that the Head of Commercial Services was using to line his pockets. By an examination of certain coded invoices that were sent by that person to a favoured contractor, Holmes was able to prove that the invoices from the officer covered precisely the same times as the contractor was carrying out work for the Council, thus the man was being paid a sum of money for every hour the contractor worked on contracts the officer had awarded. When I congratulated him, he said ‘Pooh, Watters, the matter was clear enough, even to an imbecile such as you. What disgusts me is that here is a man who is prepared to cheat his employer and yet wails and cries for mercy when he is uncovered. I am not the official Police, but I felt like turning the matter over to them, when I saw him slink away, tail between his legs, like a common cur.’
‘You let him go?’ I enquired.
‘The good name of this authority is all that I care to uphold,’ said he. ‘I have often taken such matters into my own hands.’
He was magnificent at full Council. When the opposition was baying for his blood, he lounged, inscrutably, on his chair. Clad in his dressing-gown and smoking-cap, he was the very essence of disdain and contempt.
‘You will excuse me,’ he would say to the opposition leader, ‘But you are in every regard my inferior, and further dialogue on this matter would not improve your case at all.’ He could not be turned, bullied, influenced or frightened. Here was a man absolutely at the peak of his powers and he effectively dragged us all up by our boot-straps.
We overlooked his occasional flagrant defiance of Council policy because he was so brilliant. In his office, he kept cigars in a coal-scuttle and tobacco in the toe-end of a Persian slipper, in breach of the council’s anti-smoking, sustainable development and anti-racialist policies, and we were never quite sure which policies he breached when he started to keep his malt whisky in a gasogene. He had two especially disconcerting habits, especially in the eyes of his ancient secretary, who had suffered the odd bout of brain-fever. Firstly, he would transfix his correspondence to the very centre of his desk with a jack-knife and secondly, he would sit in an armchair with a hair-trigger Eley’s Number 2 revolver and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with the crest of the Council in bullet-pocks. Finally, I often had to hide the syringe and the seven-per-cent solution from the Director of Human Resources when she came sniffing around to see if a clue existed that might incriminate our leader. I couldn’t allow that - Sherlock Holmes was the best thing to have happened to this Council in a century and a half.