The first year of her reign having been marked by vision and a sense of fair play the modern day Queen of Hearts should be invited to help lay down the law for the whole of Scottish football according to one of her closest advisers.

As he peered into his looking glass back at what has happened since Ann Budge took ownership of the club with which he has been identified for the past 30 years Craig Levein - the man she appointed as director of football at Tynecastle - made no attempt to hide his admiration for the way she has gone about her business.

Clearly he has been impressed by the business-like approach Budge has brought to the club, but even moreso by the principles that lie behind that, a sense of which he had developed in planning meetings before she took ownership of the club.

His consequent feeling that "something good was going to happen" was borne out since, whereas Lewis Carroll's hot-headed grotesque would furiously demand the heads of those who displeased her, this ruler's commands are motivated much more by a capacity to calmly look towards the longer term implications of decisions.

"She's fair, she's calm and most unusually for football, all she's concerned with is what is happening in five years time, not what's happening in a year," Levein explained.

That has not been his previous experience in a lifetime spent in the sport, largely in Scotland, during which short-termism has dominated the outlook of those in authority.

"In Scotland, some of the decisions that have been made in the last ten, 15 years have all been about money and 'how can it help us tomorrow?' It's never been about what should Scottish football look like in ten years time?" said Levein.

"It's so refreshing for someone to come and say to me, 'go away and tell me what you want the academy to look like in five years time'."

However what struck him even more than that was Budge's determination to ensure that those in her charge are treated with decency and consideration, as exemplified by her insistence on paying all those working for the club the living wage.

"She's so fair with certain things," he continued.

"Right out of the blue at a board meeting I think it was Eric (Hogg, the club's operations director) that brought it up right... and she said, 'I think we should do more for the people that are working for us'.

"It costs the club money but it's the right thing to do."

His previous job having been manager of the national team in a country that is obsessed by football but has made a horrific mess of running it during 20 years that has seen one club after another face obliteration Levein, who notes that he has repeatedly witnessed the difficulties existing administrators have when asked to consider the greater good, believes they should draw example from Budge.

"I've been to a lot of these meetings when I was with Scotland, meetings about youth development and changing the structure for under-20s. You get these people in a room and they can't agree on anything," he observed.

"Everything is about, 'what I want, what's best for me?'

"She's in a position that people should listen to her because she's speaking for the right reasons.

"She's not trying to be something. She's trying to help basically. She'll say, 'this doesn't make sense, why are we doing it this way?'

Levein consequently believes it would be in the sport's wider interests to give Budge a role in the game's governance, perhaps as a member of the board of the SPFL which she criticised recently over its handling of the timetabling of the last weekend of Championship fixtures.

"I would love to see her in that sort of thing. I think she represents supporters as well," he noted, adding that her attitude to the paying public is different to those who simply want to take their money.

"The place she is in in her life has allowed her to come in and look at things with a fresh pair of eyes," he explained.

"It's almost black and white. 'Is it fair or is it not fair'. If it's not fair we can't do it."

His placing of such emphasis on those virtues speaks to Levein's own outlook and is perhaps why things have worked so well with him taking on the director of football role and Robbie Neilson coaching the first team in what is a new arrangement for Scottish football.

"It's coming to the UK," Levein said of the director of football role.

"Les Reed has done the job done at Southampton and everyone is looking and saying, 'how can Southampton constantly perform at that level?'

"The days of Mourinhos and Fergusons and Wengers...it's getting too big. They control things because they've got huge personalities, massive personalities (but) there are a lot of foreign owners coming into football.

"I did it at Dundee United. Trying to run a club from top to bottom is not easy, there are so many things going on."

Yet it is by no means a case of simply putting a new structure of this sort in place.

"It's all right saying you have a template, but it's personalities," Levein observed, candidly admitting that once he was set in his ways in management he would not have liked to have had such a structure imposed on him.

"If you put the wrong people in... an experienced manager and a director of football in on top of that, it's never going to work.

"It's about people. The coach has to look upon it as a help to him rather than a hindrance.

"I think it's coming because clubs are so big, particularly down in England and we're right next door to it. To manage the whole thing is becoming more and more difficult?"

In short there is no magic ingredient, but with hard work and a bit of creative thinking footballing Wonderlands can still be created as Hearts supporters who are living the dream will gladly testify right now.