The Sketch: Only incompetence offers us hope against this Government

Simon Carr

Published: 28 February 2007

It's nice at my age to come across things that are incomprehensible. It helps a fellow out of bed in the morning, the sense that there's more to find out. What's a "dampening formula", for instance, or "double damping"? It's probably something to do with local government as Ruth Kelly was on the front bench. That's as far as I can go. I don't even really know what a unitary authority is. When people start to explain it I'm only woken up by the crack of my forehead hitting the desk in front of me.

That funny Phil Woolas talked laughingly about the "grant formula" and later changed it to "formula grant". Maybe it was an anagram?

Earlier, David Cairns had scoffed at the ignorance of questioners asking why Scottish immigration officers had lesser powers than English and Welsh officers. From his account, immigration is a devolved matter but border controls aren't. And anyway, Scottish immigration officers have exactly the same powers as any other. The Bill says so. Or maybe it says that while saying the opposite. No one in the House understood what he was talking about. The sound of heads hitting desks all over Britain sounded like Ginger Baker's "Toad" (a drum solo, may I say to anyone under 50).

Maybe they're all asking questions they've translated through three or four different computer programs. When you put Ruth Kelly's assertion through Babelfish a few times, "We're introducing a new duty on public authorities for gender equality", it turns out as "The introduction is us new the duty on the average room of ton of authorities more equality of the type". But it doesn't seem without meaning, particularly. Not in the context.

In the Public Accounts Committee, the head of the biometric passports project was asked whether his department had the capacity to deliver what had been promised. He didn't say, yes, no, maybe or that he didn't know. He said: "It's one of my key management issues to confirm that we do." That's Whitehall for "all of the above". I found the session quite dispiriting. It has been easy to assume, given the history of government database projects, that ID cards simply wouldn't work. Now I'm not so sure. They say they've delivered biometric passports on time and within budget. That is very unexpected. If they go on like this, we'll be forced to fight purely on the merits of the case. Hardly a single argument the Government makes on the issue stands up to scrutiny. We know this. But absurdity is not enough. Only uselessness will carry the day. We mustn't give up hope yet.

sketch@ simoncarr.co.uk