Work in progress

Q: When does being ‘barely literate’ qualify you for a job?

A: When you want to be a policeman. When you want to be an NHS doctor. When you want to be a copywriter.

Shock, horror: some police officers are ‘barely literate’ according to Tom Winsor, a lawyer, appointed by the government to review police recruitment standards.

Mr Winsor also commented on how recruitment questions were ‘very, very, very significantly harder’ 60 years ago than they are today. That’s a shedload of verys.

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Poor Mr Ensor, who, as a lawyer, can’t be easily shocked, seems positively startled by this revelation. What world can he have been living in to be so out of touch?

The bigger question is should we be worried? As we go about our own daily grind, should we start to question why our police were ever called ‘wonderful’ by our American cousins and ‘the best in the world’ by successive British governments? Question it very, very, very hard in fact?