On Government - How NOT To Do It

It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come into power than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering "How not to do it".

It is true that from the moment a general election was over, every returned member, who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the Honourable gentleman on the opposite benches, on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, now began to find all ways and means to devise "How it was not be done".

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens who coined the term "Circumlocution Office"