B&B 2

This morning's second B is Brown.

Thanks to Brown's simultaneous merger and cost-cutting at Customs & Excise and the Inland Revenue, HMRC is ‘almost stretched to breaking point’, the Treasury Select Committee has been told.

It employs badly-trained staff who regularly give out the wrong advice, lose letters or simply do not know what they are talking about, they heard.

And only last week the Public Accounts Committee found that HMRC caused uncertainty, worry and unfairness to millions of people through their “mismanagement” of the PAYE system. In December 2009, their system suggested that 7 million people had mispaid in 2008/09, but the state sector woodentops made no public statement about the situation until September 2010, when it said 4.3 million people had paid too much tax, and 1.4 million too little.

Bravo, Brown.

We now know that Brown's government coached Libya on how to persuade the Scottish government to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the alleged Lockerbie bomber. Nothing to do with us, they said at the time. That was a lie.

And in yesterday's Commons debate, where was persistent absentee Brown? Still spurning the parliamentary duties he's paid for.

As usual, Macavity's not there.