Brown cares more about faction fights than the betrayal of 25 million citizens

There is so much faux theatricality in the House of Commons that it is rare to hear a genuine gasp of incredulity of the sort that coursed around the chamber when Alistair Darling laid out the scale of the latest and greatest disaster on Tuesday. The personal details of 25 million people, including the bank account numbers and sort codes for every child benefit recipient, had been put on two computer discs which were sent from HM Revenue & Customs in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London a month ago, and lost in the post. The personal details of every parent in the land are on the loose.

Despite attempts by the Chancellor to blame this on the ‘junior official’ who sent the data or the courier company, systemic problems are quickly becoming clear. Mr Brown’s merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs has bequeathed an organisation so dysfunctional that it is possible for data of this sort, of incalculable value to identity fraudsters, to be handled and transferred in the most sloppy, careless manner imaginable. Stories are now emerging about how, post-merger, it was not unusual to find entire rooms of unopened mail.

What makes all this so toxic for Mr Brown is that it fits a pattern. The appalling disclosure came the very day after Mr Darling had explained why taxpayers may not, after all, see the safe return of the £24 billion of their money that he lent to Northern Rock. It came a week after the Home Secretary’s confession that some 5,000 illegal immigrants had been cleared to work in security jobs, including the task of guarding the Prime Minister’s car. All this would be richly comic, were it not laden with such serious implications for so many.