JUST imagine this for a moment. It’s been lashing down all night and now it’s blowing a gale. There’ll be no let-up for hours, say the forecasters.

You switch on your local radio station and find that the council has had a look outside too. Just to be on the safe side that they won’t be doing the bins today and a lot of other services are off too.

Maybe you’ll decide if you can’t beat them, you join them and head off back to bed. Or – more likely – you melt a few telephone wires telling them what you think.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not another wise-after-the-event sermon about how everyone over-reacted on Monday. There was a serious situation in which lives were lost and many organisations public and private worked really well in appalling conditions.

But to report that trains and other services in the South and West were disrupted by the storm, is just plain wrong. They weren’t.

They were withdrawn by their operators who made a judgement call that it wasn’t safe to run them, before the storm began. We’ll never know if they were right, whether it would have been worth the risk.

And it is that little word “risk” that it hinges on because the public and private sectors have a wholly different approach to risktaking and risk-sharing and it is something that is soon going to affect us all.

It’s not like you think, either. The mission of a private business is to deliver a service at minimum risk to itself. It avoids situations where its assets, reputation or finances might be damaged. To be blunt, it cherry picks and shifts the risks or impact of its actions onto others. The train operators didn’t walk away unharmed from the storm, but the main damage was to the wider economy, not their finances.

It’s different for public bodies like councils, the emergency services and hospitals. They absorb risk on behalf of others and to do so they provide services in situations which a private company wouldn’t touch. We specialise in hard cases where the risk to our finances or reputation is greatest. It can be keeping the roads open and the streets swept in appalling conditions or looking after families and children living on the edge.

In some of these cases, all our endeavours cannot prevent catastrophe. But we can never choose to walk away without trying.

Remember this as councils and other traditional providers retreat from public services and are replaced in the main by private companies.

There will be a wholly different relationship between you and those firms. Their accountability is to the board of directors, not the ballot box. It could be an even ruder awakening than some of us had earlier this week.

LOOK, we a’re nearing the end of this column, so let me say this.

Don’t worry, I haven’t lost it. But I had welcome confirmation this week that I’m not the only one to spot an annoying new mannerism among politicians.

Listen the next time one responds to a tough question. I’ll bet you any money they pause and then say “Look.”

Just a shade away from aggression and rudeness, it is meant to say “I’m in command now” and it irritates the life out of me.

Perhaps there’s a bright spark in some party HQ who gets paid £10 every time a politician slips someone a “Look.” Now I’ve blown it for them.

Sorry friend, but look, it just had to stop.