The brilliant advice Winston Churchill gave to his office staff

Upon ascending to the premiership in 1940, Sir Winston Churchill sent a memo that went after what he called 'Officialese'.

Sir Winston was a veteran of both Conservative and Liberal administrations, and had served in the the Admiralty, the Home Office, and the Munitions Ministry.

In his time, he'd evidently come across the sort of management-speak still satirised today.

In honour of Sir Winston's birthday, the Cabinet Office released a memo from 9 August 1940 which showed the new prime minister dishing out his wisdom to his staff.

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.

Preach.

The prime minister continued, by asking for shorter paragraphs, headings which can be explained orally, and for statistics to be placed in an appendix.

He then turned his attention to the use of a meandering writing style.

Let us have an end of such phrases as these: 'It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations...', or 'Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect...' Most of these wooly phrases are mere padding which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrases, even if it is conventional.

Hear! Hear!

It's worth noting as readers chortle at Sir Winston's plain common sense, that Tory MP Alan Duncan sent out a similar message in 2012, for which he was widely ridiculed.

When Duncan was a minister at the department for International Development, it was revealed in the Daily Telegraph that the junior minister had issued instructions to civil servants to avoid certain managerial terminology.

In particular, the use of 'going forward' was banned from departmental memos.

Peak diva was reached by Liam Byrne whose other famous note was entitled 'Working With Liam Byrne', in which the chief treasury secretary asked his new department to bring him cups of coffee and bowls of soup at specific times of the day.

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