Off the rails

In Times Comment this morning Matthew Parris draws attention to:

The valedictory dispatch of Tom Winsor, the Rail Regulator, who departed his post in 2004. This is Mr Winsor's candid advice to his successor as Regulator. It's a beautifully crafted epistle of bitter wisdom about political cowardice, short-termism and deceit, and “the courtier mentality of some civil servants”.

It's worth reading in full for insights like this:

The tendency of Ministers - especially in this Government - is to want to control things. They wrongly assume or accept public responsibility for operational matters rather than overall transport policy, and then when they start getting blamed for things, they look around for levers to pull; finding none, they want to seize the existing ones (usually from the regulatory authority, because it has the richest endowment) or (worse) create new ones which overlap or conflict with the existing system.