The danger is always that by the time the story reaches Treasury, it has become a number. My job, as I understood it, was to keep putting the person back into the number, the valley back into the region, the farm back into the statistic and the voice back into the plan. That was not always neat work. It was not always comfortable work. Sometimes it meant arguing gently, sometimes arguing firmly, and sometimes driving someone down a road until they could see for themselves what no report had managed to explain.