George Osgerby considers some of the weakest links in governments over the years to make up a cabinet of the incompetent

THE bloom has come off the rose that is Tony Blair's Government. Among the most disillusioned are thousands of former Labour Party members and those who once preferred the Prime Minister to sliced bread but who are now deluded by the misconeption that an administration led by an unprincipled Old Etonian lightweight would not be worse.
That is the consolation for incurable optimists and hardened cynics alike to clutch at. Things could always be - and previously have been - even worse. Over the past few decades, some of the highest offices in the land have been held by numbers of the serially inept and terminally useless.
So who would constitute a Cabinet of the biggest bunglers? As Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher is disqualified because she was neither ham-fisted nor hopeless.  Much of what she did was vicious and pernicious but she meant to do it and she could govern - crudely and cruelly, yet not ineffectively. James Callaghan held all the great offices of state and was accused of being not up to scratch in any of them. But when he was in Number 10 Downing Street, the odds and the numbers in the House of Commons were against him. Three Tories whose achievements do not constitute an embarrassment of riches are Edward Heath, who gave the nation failed Thatcherism, John Major, who gave it the cones hotline, and Alec Douglas-Home in the early 1960s, who gave it nothing. He was harshly but not inaccurately described by Private Eye as resembling a half-witted earl from the fiction of P.G. Wodehouse. However, they are probably outclassed in the bumbling stakes by Anthony Eden. Had he become Prime Minister earlier, he might have achieved something positive. But he didn't and he didn't. And his reputation will be forever stained by the Suez Crisis, which has left this country in the pocket of the United States for much of the time since.
Gordon Brown still enjoys a reputation for fiscal prudence as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The same cannot be said for Anthony Barber, his Conservative predecessor under Heath, who many on his own side regarded as the Treasury's most clueless occupant. But he was surely outflanked in foolishness by Norman Lamont, who presided over the fiasco of Black Wednesday, Britain's humiliating exit from the European Union's exchange rate mechanism, had trouble managing his own credit card, sang in his bath and regretted nothing. It should not be forgotten that he was advised in his travails by one David Cameron.
Roy Jenkins was a decent and effective Home Secretary. Has anyone else done anything to warrant that description? Opportunistic rabble-rousing and pandering to tabloid newspapers does not count. However, out of a plethora of poltroons, the worst of a bad bunch could be David Waddington, a hanger, flogger and no-hoper who served briefly under Thatcher. The Tories must have realised something was amiss because he was rapidly shunted upstairs to the House of Lords in 1990 and later became Governor of Bermuda - perhaps because it was considered a safe distance away.
Foreign Secretary is one of the most problematic jobs in government. If there is any credit going, the Prime Minister tends to take it, while approbation is directed towards the Foreign Office. What ever happened to an ethical foreign policy? Whatever it is that Margaret Beckett is covering herself in, it isn't glory. However, there have been far worse than her. John Major was Foreign Secretary for just three months in 1989. In such a short space of time, his instinct on just about everything - Maastricht, the ERM - was wrong. He departed to replace Nigel Lawson at the Treasury and some commentators say that if he had been in Number 11 for a bit longer before moving next door, he would have been hailed as one of the worst Chancellors, too. Labour's own David Owen (and there's a phrase you don't often hear) was also over-rated and over-promoted at the Foreign Office.

Some regard Secretary of State for Northern Ireland as an impossible job. But some have failed with greater crassness than others. For instance, Peter Brooke chose the day after an IRA bombing to sing Oh My Darling, Clementine on television. Roy Mason was a model of brutish insensitivity and so antagonised the SDLP's Gerry Fitt that he declined to vote in the same lobby as Mason when it came to the vote of no-confidence motion that brought down the Callaghan Government.
As for Wales, John Redwood found it difficult even to feign an interest when he was the principality's Secretary of State. However, when he failed to learn the words of the Welsh national anthem, he demonstrated that, on solemn occasions, it is better to stand in respectful silence than open and close your mouth in an approximate impersonation of a goldfish.
Under Thatcher, anti-Tory Scotland had to endure the ferociously Thatcherite Michael Forsyth as their Secretary of State. He gave the Scots the hated, iniquitous poll tax a whole year before the English had it foisted on them. What a nincompoop. The Scots rewarded him with the grand order of the boot, when they were able to apply it.
There are those who will never forget the sheer awfulness of Geoff Hoon as Defence Secretary or the risible invocation of the SAS by fake tough guy Michael Portillo before his current touchy-feely incarnation. At least neither man is known to have fallen asleep at an inappropriate occasion and before a phalanx of photographers - the sorry fate that befell Fred Mulley.
As Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine likened himself to Cardinal Wolsey. Perhaps he meant they had a shared interest in DIY. Irvine spent a fortune on wallpaper, which may have done as much as anything to ensure that the post was abolished.
Of those who have been in charge of the National Health Service, there is a litany of bungling Tories who can be charged with gross mismanagement and chronic under-funding. But how many of them actually attempted to dismantle the NHS by privatising it so openly? Thus it's looking very grim for the hopeless Patricia Hewitt, while the days of amiable duffer Frank Dobson are now reminiscent of a golden age. While dishonourable mentions must be made of William Waldegrave, appropriately dubbed "Wille Wally", and Virginia Bottomley, much of the blame for the present shambles can be laid at the door of ultra-Blairite Alan Milburn and his enthusiasm for management consultants and paying doctors a fortune. Also, when he returned to the Cabinet to run Labour's 2006 general election, it was rapidly realised he should not be put in charge of a whelk stall.

Here is some bad news that Stephen Byers - the self-styled "outrider for the Blairite project" - might wish to see buried. He was a truly rotten Secretary of State for Trade Industry. He allowed porn magnate Richard Desmond to get his mitts on the Daily Express. Byers was also heavily criticised for his part in the MG Rover Group. He advocated a deal with the Phoenix consortium, which ultimately collapsed five years later, yielding massive losses to taxpayers and big profits to Phoenix. Perhaps he could job-share with Norman Tebbit, who was hard but grossly unfair. He presided over employment was there was mass unemployment and over trade and industry while they were being decimated.
"Dire", "Appalling", "Catastrophic" - just some of the appellations applied to John Patten's reign as Secretary of State for Education. But is he the one who most needs to be given 1,000 lines and told to see the teacher after the school? Or was the performance of Margaret Hilda Thatcher - the milk snatcher - even more lamentable?
Whatever happened to John Prescott's
10-year plan for transport? Soon, the Department of Transport may need to be renamed, since it will supervise so little movement but, rather, prevail over gridlocked roads and cancelled trains. The list of wise privatisations is not a long one, but heading the catalogue of calamitous ones could well be the sell-off the railways presided over by John Macgregor. Can even Cecil Parkinson claim to be so woeful? Those who used to think British Rail was bad subsequently came to recognise it as a paragon of efficiency and economy in comparison with what the Tories delivered.
Prescott does not get away lightly. His environmental contribution is not a distinguished one, although it may surpass that of David Miliband. As for his performance as Blair's number two, every Prime Minister may need a Willie, as Thatcher said of Wille Whitelaw, but it is not conclusive that every Prime Minister needs a Johnny.
On the agriculture front, it takes the biscuit to force-feed a beefburger to a close relative while failing to get to grips with BSE and address a crisis before it grips the country. That's John Selwyn Gummer's claim to fame.

Notwithstanding Peter Lilley and his heinous little list of the poor to whom he did not want to give any benefits, the most ineffectual overseer of Social Security must be John Moore. He was among the many anointed as Thatcher's heir apparent during her interminable rule. This was usually the equivalent of the kiss of death to a political career and Moore's own duly went down the toilet.
International Development is a tricky area. It has tended to be something the Tories regard as ripe for pruning rather than making a priority, while Labour has quite a good record. Unfortunately, under this Government, aid has gone hand in hand with encouraging developing nations to privatise everything that isn't nailed down. This sorry process began under the auspices of Clare Short, who once told inhabitants of the volcano-ravaged  island of Montserrat that they would "be wanting golden elephants next", and who now affects to despise the administration of which she was a prominent member for so long.
It might be supposed that Leader of the House of Commons was a difficult job to bodge up. But Ann Taylor gave that a go, briefly, under Tony Blair, while Tony Newton was fairly aimless for rather longer in John Major's directionless Government.
In the House of Lords, Valerie Amos currently supervises the largely botched efforts to reform it. But she does not have the same lack of aptitude as John Wakeham or David Waddington.
As for Chief Whip, it takes a particular talent to be held to account for humiliating defeats in the House of Commons when governing party enjoys a thumping majority. But that is what Hilary Armstrong managed to do. In her defence, she was once nasty to turncoat Liberal Democrat MP, crap poet and sex pest Paul Marsden, so can be excused up to a point.
And there we have it, a Cabinet collection of calamitous clots and damaging dunderheads. That is unless readers can do better - or worse.