Andy Welsh, the college’s corporate services director, said: “I don’t think anything has gone wrong. It is just a case of bringing the college up-to-date so that its needs are met. It is not that anything has gone wrong in the past. We just need to be a different sort of organisation going forward in the future.”

A different sort of organisation, presumably, in that it will be smaller, with less teaching.

I am reminded of the recently-departed former prime minister James Callaghan. “Crisis, what crisis?” he was quoted as saying, (although the words were the work of a headline writer) when he got back from holiday to find the economy collapsing around his ears. It’s nice to know the spirit of optimism through adversity has not died with him.

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