Words often have a habit of coming back to bite you.
That’s certainly true for Westminster City Council’s recently-departed deputy leader Melvyn Caplan, who resigned last month over the much-mocked Marble Arch Mound.
Cllr Caplan quit after costs for the ridiculed tourist attraction nearly doubled to £6m and the 82-ft tall man-made mountain suffered a catastrophic opening.
Diary dutifully checked the archives and found that Cllr Caplan wrote for us in 2014.
Back then Cllr Caplan talked about how local government should not fear making savings and becoming ‘ever more efficient and streamlined’.
‘Financial prudence is going to be here for some time,’ the 2014 version of Cllr Caplan wrote.
Perhaps the mound should have been at the top of Cllr Caplan’s streamlining list.