One of the greatest political innovations is the Bermuda Pants Triangle. Rather than making any attempt to fix the problems they created, leaders in power whine about the people blaming them for how everything is screwed up. So politicians and special advisers are tasked with coming up with a way of shifting the blame for everything somewhere else.
The solution is to install a czar to look into the problem, and then create independent watchdogs and regulators to oversee the specific things screwed up. The people blame their leader, the leader blames the czar, the czar blames the regulator, and the regulator blames the government. The people become disillusioned with nothing actually being fixed, and the whole problem disappears into the Bermuda Pants Triangle.
Inevitably, much more time and taxpayer money is spent shifting the blame than could have gone into completely resolving the issues in the first place, and the whole useless mess becomes the accepted norm.
That's what great leadership is all about.
Now when you contact anyone about a problem and you are given the run around several departments, you are sucked into a BPT vortex and lost forever. Here is your comprehensive guide to the czars and watchdog offices of responsibility-hand-washing:
Rudeness csar: OffHand
Animal organs czar: OffAll
Carpeting czar: OffCuts
Cycling czar - OffRoad
Prevarication czar - OffAgenonagen
Sickness czar - OffWork
Redundancy regulator - OffShove
Missing persons supremo - OffRadar
Murder czar - OffBump
Offend - Government body formed to look into bottoms :
Offence - Government body formed to regulate the trade in stolen goods
Offline - Government body formed to oversee drug rehabilitation centres
Office - Government body formed to oversee activities in Antarctica
Offend - Government body formed to look into bottoms
Offsett - Government body supervising farmers' provision for badgers
OffTen - Government body responsible for supervising decimalisation
Office for Retail Milk Standards to be called OffMilk
New Government body to regulate boring football talk - OffSighed
Music Industry regulator - OffBeat
Skiing - OffPiste
It support - OffAndonagain
Counterfeit goods - KnockOff
Offquay - regulator for small harbours
Offerr, offagain and offtopic - regulatory bodies for "Just A Minute"
Offgrid - regulation of crossword, sudoku and related puzzle compilers
Offlimits - governor governance
Offsure - management of uncertainty in parliamentary statements
Offwight - local government quango overseeing Ryde to Southsea journeys
Offenders - alternate name for the Council of British Proctologists
OffplanIT - committee overseeing large government technology projects
Offcock - gender reassignment surgery
And the new Water regulator is to be renamed as UTwat, the 'U' standing for Useless, and...
Contributions from and hat tips to:
Lockjaw, deskpilot, Jack the Quipper, Titus, FlashArry, peterg, SteveB