NICOLA Sturgeon’s top official tried to explain her "visions" for local government to fellow mandarins by using the Oasis hit Wonderall, official files have revealed.
Leslie Evans, the Scottish Government’s £170,000-a-year Permanent Secretary, quoted the song in a now baffling PowerPoint presentation released today by the National Records of Scotland.
On one slide, Ms Evans offered a choice between Noel Gallagher’s tune and the most famous poem by TS Eliot, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“Local Governance: Wasteland or Wonderwall?” she asked above pictures of the two rarely-contrasted wordsmiths.
The Wasteland is widely regarded as the most influential poem of the 20th century; Wonderwall won the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Song in 1996.
However Ms Evans, who is married to a former musician, appeared to prefer the Mancunian to the American, giving the “Final word” in her presentation to Mr Gallagher’s line “All the roads we walk along are winding/And all the lights that lead us there are blinding”.
The idiosyncratic lecture is contained in newly opened Scottish Government records.
In September 2003, while working in a previous role at the Local Government and Constitution and Finance Division, Ms Evans gave the presentation to fellow high-level Scottish Executive managers.
It was billed as a “presentation on the key commitments and proposals for local government and local governance more generally”, and included “a proposal to carry out a ‘Local Government Visions’ scenario-planning exercise”.
The exercise, which also featured the classic Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life and said of better governance “sexy it ain’t”, left managers pondering a series of “key questions”.
According to the minutes, these included basics such as “are our objectives clear enough” and “do we sufficiently understand the direction we want to travel in”.
Policy officials were afterwards tasked with “trying to conceptualise the issues in the context of the proposals for work on Local Government visions”.
Ms Evans became the Scottish Government’s most senior official in July 2015.
In recent years she has faced calls to resign over her role in the Alex Salmond affair.
She oversaw the Scottish Government’s flawed probe into sexual misconduct claims made against the former FM in 2018, which led to a court defeat for the Government and a £512,000 bill for taxpayers for Mr Salmond's costs.
She is married to Derek McVay, a former member of 1970s Edinburgh punk group The Visitors who became a production manager for the jazz-funk band Jamiroquai.
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