The Sketch: Just what we need in government - a healthy inability to see the truth

The good news for mockers, scoffers and other sideline riff-raff is that the Health front bench is now the weakest front bench since the famous Ministry of Losers of 1285 headed by Messrs Claptrappe, Fule, Malodorose, Fookface and Rant.

Unfortunately, we can't be rude about the two women. Melanie Johnson is a woman I unjustly maligned when she was at the Exchequer. I remember it with shame. Let us pass over her with the observation that her friends and opponents all agree on one thing: she's useless. Rosie Winterton, while a small notch less useful, is an adornment. This led the Norfolk stick insect known as Henry Bellingham to observe that she will add sparkle to the front bench. We all like sparklers. For a while.

The men consist of John - The Husk - Hutton, the only survivor of the reshuffle, and the only one to have any idea of what he's talking about. He is too intelligent to take pressure well. He is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome (someone tell him the trauma has hardly started). The minister looks like a phantom haunting the front bench, sitting there chewing his lip while others babble and jabber at the despatch box. I give him six weeks.

Next, for reasons which are no longer apparent, we have Stephen Ladyman. I remember him telling the Prime Minister about research which proved that state schools got children better grades than private schools (which should therefore be abolished).

That ability to deny reality obviously made an impression on the Prime Minister. "We could use that demented, psychotic inability to see the truth," Tony Blair must have thought. I calculate that if Mr Ladyman stays in the job two years he will be personally responsible for the deaths of 5,000 NHS patients. No mean feat, you'll agree.

And this notwithstanding the fact that the department will be spending "a staggering amount of money". The new Health Secretary kept saying it and boggling. Sixty billion pounds a year. Think of the mortgage you could service with £60bn. You could probably buy Africa. If you were hiring the board to run our largest company, would you put this group of misfits, nitwits and idiots in charge? Look: one of them said that, considering the amount of bureaucracy and form-filling involved, it wasn't sensible to try to track the money put into cancer treatment. What kind of whelk stall would survive that management?

I'm not going to say anything unpleasant at all about John Reid, not wanting to provoke him into adding to the burden on the NHS. However, he did observe that the "staggering investment" represents the largest state hand-out since the dissolution of the monasteries. His doctorate is in history rather than medicine. And not the history of the Reformation, as you can see.

On the one hand, we have the largest confiscation of wealth by the state in British history; on the other we have the largest increase in public spending ever known - of course it's easy to confuse the two. It's probably essential, if you're to be the Secretary of State for Health.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com