Bad management

Ruthlessly ambitious politicians don't necessarily make good managers. And good managers at the top of a busy government department are important.

It was already well known that John Reid was a political thug and a bully. How strange, then that his junior ministers at the Home Office seem not to tell him things. Could it be that they get bawled out? Yes, according to a recent leak to the Financial Times. Mr Reid is clearly more concerned about his own political image than he is about running his department properly.

If a junior minister brings you bad news and you chop them off at the knees, are they going to tell you next time? No, they'll keep their heads down as long as they can. And then someone else will tell the media first.

In Patricia Hewitt's Department of Health, only 16% of its senior civil servants think it is well managed. What chance, then, for the rest of the Nationalised Health Service, which employs over 1 million people?

The reality is, no manager, however talented, could make such a huge organisation efficient. And the stories coming out of the NHS show its managers are really not especially talented.

The organisational set-up of government isn't conducive to good management and never will be. So the bigger it is, the more wasteful it's going to be.