We were careful to tell him that the job he was going to was a full time job and that he would have to relinquish any interests he had pro tem. We had become aware that he had a day job and a sideline. He replied that this was understood as his uncle had been a Government Minister and he knew the score.
Needless to say, this stimulated our curiosity as to who his uncle was and, as I later determined, our speculation was way wide of the mark.
Needless to say I was very interested in everything about him as he was the first Irish appointment to the board of this institution from the private sector.
In retrospect I think he had great ambitions to make his mark on the wider world through his term on the board of this institution. I suspect he had lots of plans by the time he arrived there, just in time for his first shock. From his reaction, I think he expected to have a significant amount of staff at his disposal to flesh out and implement his plans. However, his constituency office consisted of just one Secretary (and a very good one I hasten to add) and his fellow board member, the Alternate Director, a Dane who would be preoccupied with his own country's interest and that of Lithuania which was part of our Board constituency.
Needless to say in the absence of somebody else to do the work, much of the plans, if they were ever there, seem to have evaporated.
I have "handled" a number of board members in international institutions in my day, but this The Director was unique. He prided himself on being a "window rattler" but turned out to be a rattler even where there were no windows. Nuff said.
Our previous board member had got on very well with his Danish co-board member. Between them they got a reputation for being hard working, concise and cooperative, especially at boad meetings. In the course of his stay, our previous member, had built many bridges and was well respected within the institution.
Our the new member was a sapper who measured his success by the number of bridges he blew up. I think he saw it as "stirring the pot".
He also had a very curious view of the relationship between Ministers and their civil servants. He seemed to think they lived in different silos. It is presumably on this basis that he thought he would get away with complaining me to my Minister behind my back.
Needless to say, the Minister passed the complaint on to me and I had no trouble dealing with it.
Quite amazingly for someone who had been in the private sector all his life, he seemed to think he possessed some serious diplomatic talents. In a letter to my Minister (a Governor of the institution) he offered his services in solving a political row which had been bouncing around the EU at the highest level (Council and COREPER) for years.
In the letter he offered to solve the Macedonian problem. This was where Greece (an EU member state) was blocking the admission of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM, an EU applicant for membership) from joining the Union. The dispute was purely over nomenclature. Greece would not allow FYROM call itself Macedonia as they had a province of the same name and feared FYROM's ambitions for a "Greater Macedonia" in the course of which they would appropriate the legacy of Alexander the Great.
Having taken advice from a colleague in the Department of Foreign Affairs, I got my Minister to forward the letter to her Minister as the most appropriate recipient. I have no idea what happened to the letter. That the controversy was solved nearly two decades later will no doubt be claimed as a success by The Director.
I should say, as an aside, that as an Irish person I was very understanding of the complexities of nomenclature in international relations and I was very much in sympathy with the Macedonians in the matter. This was also true of The Director's predecessor who neatly solved an interim version of the problem at one of the institution's Annual Meetings.
Anyway, back to The Director, who I must actually thank for allowing me to add the term "fashion consultant" to my official CV. I hope my advice worked out OK and assume it did as I never received any complaint following the relevant function.
I also have to thank The Director for bringing me up to date on the connotations of the male moustache in an LGBT+ context in the London of the day. This arose out of me asking him why he had shaved off his own moustache.
He also showed myself and my colleague how to assert you are not frustrated while exhibiting all the signs of frustration bordering on something more serious. This was some performance. Maybe a stage career in later life?
Anyway, I could go on a bit more but had better stop before I lose the run of myself.
[also grateful for ????}
At the end of the day, my own frustration with The Director led to the release of my creative juices and a little poem in the first official language, which you can enjoy below.
Ode to a DirectorA version with footnotes
The Ultimate Ejaculation
