Plastic poll tax

It seems increasingly plausible that among the many Britons to have had their identities stolen is one T. Blair of London SW1. Perhaps it was an application for a platinum card, carelessly discarded in the Downing Street dustbin, which allowed the criminals to strike; perhaps it was a greasy teenage boffin who hacked his way into Tony’s PC. Whatever it was, it is difficult otherwise to reconcile the fresh-faced, liberal-minded Tony Blair of the 1980s and 1990s, who championed human rights and made a stand against overbearing government, with the waxy, angular authoritarian who passes himself off as Tony Blair today.

Perhaps a biometric examination of his eyeballs, under the government’s proposed ID card scheme, will settle the matter for good. Or perhaps not. Given the multiple failures of other government IT systems, chronicled elsewhere in these pages, it is improbable that the Home Office will get a remotely reliable national ID database in return for an outlay, estimated in a thorough study by the LSE, of £19 billion.