The honours list addresses leak bodes ill for this government’s administrative abilities

All signs suggest this it will be Britain’s the most interventionist government since the 1970s. And the more a government intervenes, the more competent it has to be

The leak by the Cabinet Office of the addresses of those who have received new years honours was indeed a “complete disaster”, as one controversial recipient observed.

Many organisations suffer data breaches but the problem for a government is far worse than for a bank or an airline. The various branches of government between them hold more information about citizens than any commercial organisation – even Facebook or Google – possibly could.

Furthermore, citizens can shut their Facebook accounts; they cannot close their accounts with Her Majesty’s Government.

This is particularly serious for the new government. Everything we know about its plans – revamping Whitehall departments, radical changes to immigration, additional controls on trade with Europe – suggest it will be the most interventionist government Britain has had since the 1970s.

And the more a government intervenes, the more competent it has to be; the more complex an economy, the more damage bad administration can do.

The coming renegotiation of the UK’s trading arrangements with the EU is just the start. The shift away from a carbon-intensive economy has so far proceeded relatively smoothly, though not swiftly enough. The next stages will be harder.

This government will be judged harshly for its shortcomings, for it has set itself up to be more than a manager of the status quo.

Our civil service is apolitical, loyal and hardworking, and this government is fortunate to have it. But there are weaknesses in the system, and the government should be extremely careful at pushing it too hard.

Politicians can and should give direction but must respect the limits of the possible.

There is an irony here. As it happens, one of the policies of recent years that has proved hardest to administer has been universal credit, a plan spearheaded by Iain Duncan Smith.

While there is no need to restate here our criticism of the whole enterprise, a big part of the problem was that it was simply too complex a change to make in the top-down, authoritarian way IDS sought.

He did not understand what could be done, and what could not. It was, to borrow his term, a “complete disaster” – but on a vastly greater scale than the one he has suffered.

There’s the rub. The government must learn to be a competent administrator. It must root out the weaknesses in areas such as IT.

It should learn from this mistake, for if it fails to there will doubtless be others far more damaging. And when these happen, it will rightly get the blame.