Who is in charge of the clattering train?

There is, obviously enough, much discussion about the debacle of Northern Rock and whether the Chancellor is now a broken reed as a result of government dithering and incompetence. I think the real story is somewhat different and rather more fundamental. Many have commented on the Prime Minister’s shattered appearance and have put this down to the strain of dealing with Northern Rock. But from all I read and, more especially, hear it seems to me that Gordon Brown has simply lost it, period.

 
His behaviour is erratic and bizarre; he phones colleagues at all hours with imperious demands while dithering over every decision he has to take. Ever since things started to go wrong for him and public fury and cynicism boiled over, he has clearly been radically destabilised. He seems to be wholly unable to cope with criticism, and more to the point unable therefore to look clearly at what is so patently going wrong and put it right. He tries to big-foot every minister and meddle in every department for all the world as if he has an uncontrollable tic; he is the Touretter of public administration. Yet the more he meddles, the more everything falls to pieces underneath him.

 
Northern Wreck may be headline news, but almost every day brings further evidence of what can only be described as the systematic collapse of public administration in Britain. In a country which once ran an entire empire and thus constructed a legend of administrative genius, the word ‘couldn’t’, ‘run’ and ‘whelk-stall’ are now on everybody’s lips. Today, for example we are told that the Crown Prosecution Service managed to lose a disc containing the DNA details of 4,000 offenders, some of whom are believed to be murderers and rapists, which the Dutch sent to Britain to be checked against the national DNA database. When the disc finally turned up in a drawer last month, it was discovered that these details match up against 11 people who have committed further crimes in Britain during the past year, a figure which could end up being very much higher. In the same month that this disc went missing, it emerged that 27,000 paper records on British citizens who had committed crimes abroad had been left in boxes in the Home Office rather than being entered on the Police National Computer; and it provides further embarrassment for the Home Office, which recently revealed that it had cleared more than 10,000 illegal immigrants to work as security guards.

 

The Times supplies a helpful time-line of missing data debacles:

January 2007 Revealed that since 1997 nearly 1,600 government computers containing sensitive information had been stolen
September A CD containing the names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and pension data of 15,000 Standard Life customers lost
October Laptop with data about 2,000 people with ISAs stolen from a Revenue & Customs employee
November 20 News of two CDs with details of 25 million Britons lost in post from a Revenue & Customs office in Tyne & Wear
November 23 Emerges that six more CDs with confidential information had gone missing
December 6 Four CDs containing details from court cases go missing
December 17 Details of three million British learner drivers lost in the US
December 18 Revenue loses data of 6,500 private pension holders
December 23 Nine NHS trusts in England say they have lost patient records kept on discs
January 9, 2008 Laptop with details of 600,000 people taken from navy officer’s car in Birmingham
January 26 Details of 1,500 students lost in the post.

With public administration in chaos and Gordon Brown in Drowning Street, one has to ask – just who is in charge of the clattering British train?