'Mail from the Equalities Commission. You're fired'

We are counting them out and counting them in, as the BBC man Brian Hanrahan said during the Falklands conflict. We are doing much the same as senior officials move the chairs around at the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. A very strange process it is too.

There are interviews this week, but already we know that two commissioners, Simon Woolley and Lady Meral Hussein-Ece, have been judged surplus to future requirements by the new commission chair, Lady O'Neill.

Woolley is, at present, the only black commissioner; Hussein-Ece the only Muslim. Both were only recently told how highly regarded they were. Both were encouraged by the government to reapply. But if they are puzzled, they are not alone. For we learn of a third commissioner who won't return. Mike Smith chaired the commission's statutory disability committee, played a key role on the regulatory committee and led the highly acclaimed formal inquiry into disability-related harassment.

Like Woolley and Hussein-Ece, he was the recipient of a glowing assessment and was invited to reapply. Like them, he wasn't accorded the benefit of an interview. Like them he learned his fate from a head hunter's automated email. "I naturally am disappointed at not being reappointed for a further term," he said. The way this is being handled must disappoint everybody. Straight out of the human resources handbook, 1986.

Guardian's Diary.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/06/hugh-muir-diary-equalities-commission