Is it true? Was Beatrix Potter really anti-consultant?

Like me, you’re no doubt reeling from the revelation that Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse” is actually a diatribe against consultants. According to the FT, she eventually narrows the door so that Mr Jackson, a toad, cannot get in, a strategy Greg Dyke, former Director General of the BBC, says is the ideal way to deal with consultants.

Rather than let the year continue on this depressing note, I’ve scoured Miss Potter’s complete oeuvre to see whether she was as anti-consultant as claimed.

In “The Tailor of Gloucester”, the eponymous craftsman is trapped in a low-margin market and eventually takes to his bed, unable to fulfil an order for a cherry red waistcoat. It’s the mice, here cast in the role of outside consultants, who step in to do the work for him. “And from then,” writes Potter, “began the luck of the Tailor of Gloucester; he grew quite stout, and he grew quite rich.” In “The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies”, it is a mouse (indeed, Mrs Tittlemouse herself) who saves the day, freeing the bunnies by nibbling a hole in the sack into which they’ve been dumped by the evil Mr McGregor.

By the time we get to the story of Mrs Tittlemouse, it’s clear that it she who is the consultant, not Mr Jackson.Obsessed with imposing order on her surroundings, it’s perhaps surprising that she doesn’t do a PowerPoint presentation on the evils of poor management, personified by the toad.

So there we have it: Beatrix Potter was a consultant in sheep’s clothing, or at least in mouse clothing...