I really don’t pay much attention to news from the Old Country any more, but sometimes stuff gets through—such as the ongoing budgetary kerfuffle. I’m less interested in FT‘s take on the budget itself, however, than in the seemingly peripheral dramas:

The OBR report found it routinely uploaded its documents before publication time to facilitate “immediate and widespread access” to them at the appropriate time. But it wrongly assumed that it had configured its website, which it managed using WordPress software, to prevent early access.

You’re running a government-appointed arms-length watchdog organisation with the word “Responsibility” in its name, and you’re using fucking WordPress as your “website solution”?

This is what we writers would call a telling detail—an almost incidental-seeming observation that serves to underscore the complete unseriousness of not only the character, but the entire milieu in which they are enmeshed. “First as tragedy, then as farce”, and all that.

(Yes, yes—this site runs on WordPress, and it’s a much more robust bit of software than it was back in the day. But I’m not using it to disseminate my supposedly objective analyses of an entire national economy, am I?)