These 'heroes' make me feel like screaming

The pain started on Tuesday when Chancellor Alistair Darling delivered his Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review.

There he was, with all the oomph of a morgue attendant, telling us how he was going to take our money and what he was going to spend it on. It was obvious the numbers are stretched to their limit.

While he droned on, my mind was cast back to the second great period of the Leader's reign.

In October 2001, Tony Blair told the Labour conference: "This party believes in public services; believes in the ethos of public service; and believes in the dedication the vast majority of public servants show; and the proof of it is that we're spending more, hiring more and paying more than ever before."

When he uttered those words, the faithful duly applauded. But, six years on, look at the words now, particularly the last part. In 2007, there is only one, weary, appropriate response to his blathering: you can say that again. No sooner had Darling sat down to the usual back-slapping than the Public Accounts Committee released a report showing that up to three quarters of the £13.3 billion in efficiency gains the Government claims to have made were unreliable and inaccurate.

The true figure, suggested the committee, was just £3.5 billion.

The Chancellor said he aimed to make £30 billion of savings by 2010. Based on the evidence so far, he has no chance.

That was followed by analysis showing the numbers of senior civil servants had increased by 40% since 2000 (from 2887 to 4031) and the wage bill had also catapulted (from £145 million to £248 million). Then came the deaths caused by poor hygiene in the hospitals in Kent. After that, there was another PAC finding, that the much-vaunted Asset Recovery Agency, set up to seize the ill-gotten gains of criminals, had spent £65 million to recover £23 million.

The new body was "ill planned" and it had been set "unachievable delivery aims" by the Home Office.

Being a citizen in Britain today and observing what is done in our name is akin to being the only sane person in a lunatic asylum.

If any business behaved in such a fashion its shareholders would demand heads. But this lot continue regardless.

To cap it all and finish me off entirely, came the revelation that the man who blows the whistle, who supplies the PAC with its material, has himself been living high on the hog at our expense.

Sir John Bourn, head of the spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, spent £365,000 on 43 trips in three years - 22 of them were first-class flights with his wife.

This, don't forget, was in the space of a few days. You shudder as to what this week will bring.

It can't go on. One of the initiatives of the second great period of the Leader's reign was the Downing Street Delivery Unit (even writing it, makes me utter a loud guffaw).

The first head of this supposed SAS of Whitehall management from 2001 to 2005, Sir Michael Barber, has written an account of his experience, Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of Achieving Targets.

Writes Barber of Blair: "He always had a tendency...to believe that in the end, through an act of his own personal will and the exercise of his own formidable powers of persuasion, he could achieve almost anything."

That's it - we're being run by people who think they're comic-book heroes. Sitting on the side at home is my tax return. I must complete it but every occasion I attempt to do so, I find myself wanting to scream.