Can't count, can't organise - and exceedingly unpleasant, too. Yes, it's the Brutish McToad

It is nearly twenty years since a BBC driver told me that of all the people he had had to ferry back and forth, Brown - then in opposition where he should have stayed - was among the most obnoxious and bullying.

So in a Sunday Times report today I was pleased to see the Witless Toad described as "brutish." As to his competence, a former director general of a Whitehall department observed about what happens under his government:

"All the worst bits of policy making come from the centre. It’s these people who think you change the world by publishing a strategy. And you don’t change a thing by publishing a strategy, it makes no difference whatsoever."

File that under "I told you so".

The report from which this came is what journalists tend to call "a devastating indictment" of the Toad and all his ways by a phalanx of top Civil Servants. Predictably, the response from the FuhrerToadBunker was "We will obviously study the report with interest. But we do not accept the conclusion."

I think I've quoted Cromwell on this attitude before: "Consider in the bowels of Christ that ye may be wrong."

Surely it is impossible to make any progress in human affairs without realising you are mistaken. But really astonishes about Brown is his utter incapacity in areas where he should, surely, as a man who was in charge of a nation's finances for ten years, be impeccable - like doing his sums.

His and the egregious Ed Balls' recent proposal to give 270,000 of the nation's poorest families free computers is a typical example of what happens. Forget the fact that right now this country, in greater debt than ever before in its history, should be conserving money, not spending it. Forget the fact that so many of the recipients of his largesse have difficulty in reading and writing, let alone mathematics.

What is really worrying is that his costings would disgrace the average trainee book-keeper. When any idiot knows that a computer can be picked up for £300 - and probably a lot less if you're buying in bulk, he was proposing to spend over £1,000 a head on this latest vote-catching wheeze.

Just sheer, old-fashioned, witless incompetence.