MAIL COMMENT: Not fit to run the proverbial whelk stall

A Home Office still unfit for purpose, an embarrassingly bad minister in charge, jaw-dropping incompetence over the loss of sensitive material, attempts to pass the buck, political cowardice... this is misgovernment at its most discreditable.

You would have thought the Home Office might learn from the scandalous litany of Whitehall security blunders, including the loss of personal information on 25million Britons. Not a bit of it.

Just examine how the department responded on Monday, when it was discovered that a memory stick containing information on every convict in Britain had been lost.

Such material could cause mayhem in the wrong hands, not to mention saddling the taxpayer with vast compensation bills if anyone were harmed because of it.

But did Home Office politicians or bureaucrats come clean? Hardly. They tried to keep it under wraps.

When the news leaked anyway, they mounted a black propaganda operation to pretend it was nothing to do with them by blaming PA Consulting, the private firm they had entrusted with the information.

This contemptible game of ‘not me, guv’ continued yesterday when – after lying low all morning – Home Secretary Jacqui Smith emerged briefly to point the finger at everybody but herself.

Meanwhile, her department claimed ludicrously that ‘there is no reason to think that the Home Office was at fault here or that the taxpayer would be required to pay compensation…’

Do these people have the slightest notion of what the public thinks of such smug, self-serving spin?

To begin with, they should have moved heaven and earth to limit the damage, instead of protecting their own backs.

Moreover, the Home Office has a long involvement with PA Consulting and has paid it around £100million for other work. Indeed, the firm has contracts worth nearly £250million across Whitehall – including the controversial ID card scheme. It is virtually part of Government. If ministerial responsibility means anything, the buck stops with Ms Smith.

But will she acknowledge it? In your dreams. Will she sack the principal culprits? Forget it.

If you want to know the true character of this most useless of Home Secretaries, consider her supposed ‘crackdown’ on paedophiles to coincide with Gary Glitter’s scheduled return home.

She must have known her promise was largely meaningless, since police have scant powers to restrict Glitter’s activities in the way she suggested.

Still, she had achieved some positive headlines ahead of any adverse publicity in the memory stick affair. Wasn’t that what her grandstanding was really about?

But there is a more serious point here. Ministers want to foist ID cards on us at a cost of countless billions and take powers to lock up terror suspects for 42 days without charge. Yet why should we trust this bungling administration?

An inept Home Secretary… a shambolic Home Office… a shameful catalogue of security lapses… you wouldn’t leave this lot in charge of the proverbial whelk stall.

POOR Nick Clegg. The cash-strapped Lib Dem leader is ‘mortgaged up to the gills’. He’s turned down the heating. He no longer has food delivered by the up-market Ocado, but makes do with Sainsbury’s.

All this and ‘frugal’ holidays too… shouldn’t his party organise a whip-round?

But then, as politicians keep reminding us, poverty is relative. Let’s not forget that Mr Clegg has a £61,000 salary, at least that much again in expenses, a goldplated pension, a £1.3million house in London, a cottage in his constituency, a well-paid lawyer wife… Hardly queuing for the soup kitchen, is he?