Recent media reports have it that my old FCO ‘line manager’ Nicola Brewer has stepped down as CEO of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to replace Paul Boateng as High Commissioner (Ambassador-equivalent in a Commonwealth country) to South Africa.

The credibility of this Independent report is wrecked by claims that Boateng is returning under a cloud after allegations that his wife had bullied domestic staff. This just can not be. She is said to be a former social worker and Labour councillor.

Yet maybe there is something in all this. The EHRC might have a vacancy for CEO and be looking for someone to replace N Brewer. The EHRC website is coy on this point as of this evening, listing Nicola as still in post and the job not available under Vacancies.

But I have applied anyway and, such being the urgency of the situation from an Equality and Human Rights point of view, not to mention the terse rigour of my application letter and CV, I was fast-tracked to a final interview this afternoon.

In the spirit of transparency I took in my pocket a neat little digital recorder, so I can share the conversation with you now.

EHRC Big Cheese:    Good morning, Charles. Good to see you here so promptly. (Titters uneasily) We all go by first names here as they are reassuring and less intimidating.

CC:    Yo Trev. A pleasure.

EHRC BC:    Now, what makes you so especially suited for this position?

CC:    I have played a personal role in delivering the end of apartheid, the end of Soviet Communism, the end of Milosevic, the arrest of war criminals across the Balkans and, according to Nicola Brewer when she wrote my appraisal, I myself was the Foreign Office’s Diversity Target. So I know far more about the wickedness of oppression and racism, and about promoting sharp-end human rights and equality, than anyone else in this building, and indeed more than Nicola herself. What else do you want?

EHRC BC:    Er, yes. What would you plan to do about the victims of racism, colonialism and slavery? Reparations?

CC:    There is a case for active efforts to deal with all communities who have suffered those horrors in living memory. So I would push for that. We can’t do everything, so at the risk of being selective or judgemental I would aim to focus ECHR help on the one large UK ethnic community who have suffered the most.

EHRC BC:    Sounds good! Bangladeshis? Tamils? Muslims? Palestinians? Sexual and other minorities within those very communities?

CC:    No. I mean Poles.

EHRC BC:    Huh?! Poles? What have they got to do with racism?

CC:    The family of every Pole alive today lost out one way or the other because of Hitler’s racist ideology which classified Poles as untermenschen.

EHRC BC:     Well, be that as it may, they were never colonised.

CC:    On the contrary, Poland was a Russian/Soviet/German/Austrian colony for most of the past 200 years – far longer than any African territory held fleetingly by the UK. The negative effects are still there.

EHRC BC:    OK, OK. But slavery was all about Africa, so Poles do not qualify.

CC:    Wrong again. There are no African former slaves alive. But there are hundreds of thousands of Poles alive who were held in Nazi or Soviet labour camps as young people. If that is not slavery, what is?

EHRC BC:    Crikey! Why did Nicola not mention any of this? Was not she in the FCO too?

CC:    Good question. I once asked her whether the horrible situation I inherited in the Embassy in Warsaw was OK on discrimination grounds. Of the 45 or so local staff working in Embassy office jobs with computers on their desks (ie not the drivers, security or cleaners), only four or so were male. That pattern is repeated across most of our posts in that part of Europe. It is impossible to see that as anything other than blatant and arbitrary unfairness aimed at males (and transgenderistic men trapped in a woman’s body until they had the op). An evil neo-apartheid based not on the colour of one’s skin, but rather on whether one has or has not the benefit of bosoms.

EHRC BC:    That’s appalling discrimination! What was the reply?

CC:    Nothing too specific, but I had a sense of ‘Don’t push your luck, soon-to-be-dead white male wiseguy’.

EHRC BC:    So what would you do as CEO?

CC:    I’d immediately get Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Lithuanians and all the rest of the central and eastern Europeans added to the ethnico-racial categories sent round in those HMG diversity questionnaires. They must not be marginalised and humiliated as at present. That might make all the questionnaires look stupid, leading to the total abolition of that way of looking at the discrimination problem. A risk we’d just have to take in the name of fairness.

EHRC BC:    Anything else?

CC:    I’d press for new legislation to encourage all possible so-called inter-racial adoptions. The idea that any one person has a unique culture, or the idea that a baby/child is a member of a given culture because of the colour of its skin, is revolting and idiotic. The faster the human race takes on a bland cappuccino tint, the faster we can ‘eradicate racism’ – a target of the EHRC I believe?

EHRC BC:    I’ve never heard this sort of thing before! Anything else?

CC:    I would get a new law passed which compelled all organisations across the UK to send to recycling all documents containing the expression Diversity Targets. Any organisation burning a pile of them on the front steps would be exempted from Carbon Emission targets in respect of that bonfire, as long as the bonfire of such papers was over six feet tall. Thereafter every organisation would be expected to recruit, employ and generally deal with its people on the basis solely of Fairness and Good Manners, both of which preclude such vulgar considerations as the way people look or talk or what their background is. Everyone treated on their merits. No more, no less. The savings would be monumental. But no-one would get a job in the public service without excellent spelling. One has to have a little positive discrimination on the margins, to keep everyone on their toes.

EHRC BC:    Look there’s little point in continuing this discussion …

CC:    Sorry, just to add that anyone attaching a notice to a wall or door by sellotape will receive a stern formal warning. Repeat performers face the sack. I will not tolerate facile discrimination between days of the week by such banalities as ‘dress-down Fridays’. Everyone smart, every day. A detail. But an important detail.

EHRC BC:    … as I want to say that you have the job! Congratulations! When can you start?

CC:    Excellent. Thanks. I’ll need a pit-stop at the Gents and then to nip out to Jermyn Street to promote Islamic finance by buying some new organic Egyptian cotton shirts and socks. Say in about 90 minutes?

EHRC BC:    Magnificent. The cardboard box will be on its way to collect Nicola and her things from her penthouse suite of offices forthwith.

CC:    I should warn you that I’ll slash the staff and budget of ECHR by 50% in the first year, to set a good example to the rest of Whitehall. OK if I accept a 60% pay cut for myself, down to just below the new 51+% tax rate? Just an aesthetic point, really. Not much sense in the government pretending to pay me one pound and then taking back more than half?

EHRC BC:    Not at all, although I am not sure that I share your scruples myself to quite that, er, radical extent.

CC:    Nema problema. I value Diversity. See you later…

* * * * *

And then … I woke up.

It had all been a nightmare.

For some.