When I was in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, one of my tasks as a young officer was to receive and circulate what we used to call valedictory dispatches. Real gems came from retiring ambassadors departing their final posts. Typically, they might sum up the diplomat's thoughts about a whole career: about ministers, policy and the Foreign Office itself. The dispatch could be incredibly rude, indiscreet, frank or funny, for its author was quitting the greasy pole for ever. Great care was taken over the drafting of these parting shots, which might be widely read and admired within the Office.

I have just seen a splendid 21st-century equivalent. Under the Freedom of Information Act someone has got hold of what was in all but name 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 (at www.rail-reg.gov.uk/upload/pdf/foi_67.pdf ). 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 should not be underestimated,” writes Mr Winsor, “just how effective the constant repetition of unjustified criticism and imaginary facts can be in shaping political and public opinion...

“...Politicians will talk about decades of underinvestment and putting right the mistakes of the past, but in general — and with some honourable exceptions — they are simply not programmed to make decisions which put the long-term interests of the industry and the public ahead of the short-term political imperatives of the moment. If the fire-alarm is ringing, the tendency is often to break the bell and stop the noise; not to put out the fire.”

Someone should research and publish a book of public servants' valedictory dispatches. We shall not have them much longer. I understand they have now been abolished in the FCO. The beauty of the Freedom of Information Act is that we can chisel the old ones out of the files. The cost is that in consequence few will now dare write them.

It is a fortnight since I brought you up to date with the cost to the taxpayer, so far, of Gordon Brown's ludicrous “citizens' juries”, to which jurors are recruited by offering them money. Then, the cash register had rung up £467,704. I'm afraid we need another update already. That figure, wrung from the minister by a written parliamentary question, was for the Department for Children, Schools and Families alone, over only four months. Now in answer to another PQ, we have the cost of NHS citizens' juries, of which there were nine in the last month.

Care to guess the figure? It's £869,930. So in total this turkey of an idea has cost well past the million-pound mark already. Well, here's a suggestion. Does Mr Brown dare (four words that are coming, invariably, to frame a rhetorical question) to hold a citizens' jury on the question of whether we should have citizens' juries?

There must be one important proviso: neither those who conduct the exercise nor those who take part in it should have (as at present they do) a vested financial interest in the turkey farm.

Before he became Prime Minister I devoted a page in The Times to the detailed story of just one of Gordon Brown's barking mad ideas. Small in itself, it provided (I suggested) a useful vignette on what is wrong with his brain. Mr Brown had proposed and forced through a plan for troublemaking teenagers to be paid — in vouchers usable at municipal leisure centres — £20 for every week in which they didn't make trouble. Of course you or I can see at once that this one's a turkey too; but a pilot scheme was duly required, and duly failed, and the whole thing was called off.

But we see from Tuesday's Queen's Speech that those little Brown head-demons have not been stilled. He and his intellectual bouncer, Ed Balls, have come up with a new idea: 17 and 18-year-olds who don't want to stay on in school are to be prosecuted, and possibly fined. There will be attempts to coerce their wretched parents too.

Do you hear, faintly from the bowels of No 10, a suppressed gobble- gobble sound? Yes, folks — it's another turkey. I'll try to keep you informed on the progress of this bird, too.

STOP PRESS: The Prime Minister is to consult on the creation and development of a “national motto”. Gobble-gobble-gobble.

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