The only fun comes in counting the number of staff requirement to put out a statement of fewer than 100 words. Take a bow Charles King (Head of Investor Relations), Dominic Cheetham (Director of Corporate Communications) and Marcus De Ville (Head of Media Relations).

Serco’s continued strong growth provides enough cover to keep everyone happy for now. When the music stops someone in Richmond will look around and wonder if all that overhead is really necessary.

But just because Mr Jones can’t claim a first, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t get credit for the move. Interserve can’t just wish away its pension problems and no one can keep repeating the trick of doubling their money in PFIs every five years. Facing up to these facts and acting on them is good, clear-sighted management.

Now here’s the thing. Of those nine deals, all were sold in 1999, 2006 or 2007; no other years saw an exit meriting a case study.

Elsewhere in the brochure there’s a pie chart suggesting that two-thirds of Cognetas’ value creation is due to earnings growth and one-third to multiple expansion. But the timing of exits suggests another factor might be at work: as we’ve said before, selling when the market’s up is also a good idea.

• That MITIE’s management is ambitious and brave. EPS, along with Dalkia’s M&E business, means it’s made two big acquisitions this year. And at £35m, EPS has cost 8x EBITDA or 15x earnings, which is not cheap and leaves a lot to prove;
• That the market is tough, especially for mid-market players like MITIE. MITIE’s results were pedestrian (organic revenue growth of 1%) which highlights that, for all MITIE’s self-postioning as a bundled outsourcer, its exposure to bread-and-butter small single-service contracts leaves more exposed to recessionary effects than companies like Serco or Carillion.

MITIE’s long been a Credo star (we love its business model) but its strategy is a little confusing and it finds itself in a tough place just now. The next year or two will be interesting (to use another favourite of Sir Humphrey’s.).

And here’s what we said earlier in the year: Would Buffett invest in Balfour Beatty?

That’s not to say we were right of course - Balfour Beatty’s shares have underperformed in the last six months - but then Warren Buffett is a famously long-term investor.

[PS. And here was our take on investing in rail, from 2007. The only difference is that Warren Buffett has wagered $44bn on his hunch.]

Balfour’s was the most instructive. Its results provide a window on a lot of different segments. Here’s Credo’s take on the state of its markets:

• good - UK Education (PPP and building), FM, UK Roads, Hong Kong;
• OK - US Construction and civils, UK utilities, Rail Sweden, US PPP;
• tough - UK regional building, ground engineering, Dubai and Rail UK and Germany.

And Babcock? Good - marine and defence. OK - nuclear and utilities. Tough - rail and flogging construction kit to South Africans.

Morgan Sindall? Good/OK - utilities, social housing and construction (thanks to education). Tough - urban regeneration and office fit out (which saw its sales fall a third on last year).

In other words, the wider market is a curate’s egg: some bits OK; some bits not. This puts the onus on good strategy (focussing on the good segments and avoiding the bad) and good, gritty management (in Balfour words, ‘where individual businesses are seeing reductions in their markets, [taking] prompt action to reduce costs’).

Part of most people’s strategy is to chum up to the Tories to get a piece of whatever’s left in the public pot. It’s cynical, but that’s business.

John McDonagh is clearly a little more high minded. That’s one interpretation of his response to news that the Conservatives aren’t so keen on BSF.

“What [the Conservatives] are talking about is a massive, massive change,” said Carillion’s chief executive. “If you look at the ageing schools stock in this country, something needs to happen to keep them in good repair.”

For a large public sector contractor, being lukewarm about the likely next government’s plans might not be good business, but it is brave.

Credo has periodically commented about waste. EU recycling directives and a push on PPP projects have made this a hot sector. Back in 2007 we noted that a host of sector players had identified waste as a growth sector. Amey, Interserve, Enterprise, VT and May Gurney, among others, all went public on thier growth plans.

And, to be fair, there have been some successes: Interserve won a PPP in Derby; VT one in Wakefield; May Gurney made a couple of small acquisitions. All good.

But here’s what Serco has achieved in the meantime: fourteen environmental services contracts with UK local authoriries. That’s jobs with Winchester, Canterbury, Cornwall, Mid Sussex, Welwyn & Hatfield, Breckland, Charnwood, Woking, Newham, Mid-Suffolk, Babergh, Hammersmith & Fulham and Bexley. This last is a £160m, fifteen year deal to collect, recycle and clean - all with a neat promise to use electric vehicles and biofuels to reduce the operation’s carbon footprint.

So why did the interview leave me wincing? It wasn’t the scale of the challenge, but the language used. Only pedants worry about ending sentences with prepositions these days -”there’s very little - perhaps other than soldiering - that the state should have an exclusive right to”. But surely making up words, ugly words, could have been avoided. Look at these:

• “the CBI wants to promote marketised choice, not private provision per se”;
• “if you look at the American model of military logistics support it is, you know, contractualised virtually up to the finger on the trigger”.

Ouch.

As part of its acquisition of Alfred McAlpine, Carillion picked up its environmental consultancy, Enviros. Enviros had itself been bought for £30m in 2007. Now as Carillion works hard to reduce its debt in these tougher times, Enviros even bulked up a bit with some old bits of its former parent, has been off-loaded for just £27m.

Time was when a sale like this would have been a carefully choreographed auction. This time it was all about finding a buyer - Sinclair Knight Merz; and no, we hadn’t heard of them either.

The long-term bull case for the green economy and its likely players is surely still in place, but in the short-term there’s a correction going on. And bankers, consultants, trade and private equity, along with the BBC, are having to face this inconvenient truth.