Another total Ballsup from laughing Ed

I just whizzed off to Capri for the wedding of two Italian friends - about which more later on, as I'm a bit of an expert on the matrimonial front - then I looked at the news this morning and what did I see?...

Well, you couldn't make it up, could you?

Who was the the chief adviser to the Blustering Toad during his haphazard but nonetheless highly successful demolition of the British Economy? It was a smirking liar called Ed Balls.

And after the said Balls had made his massive contribution to our national debt, future taxes, etc., he was moved on - before he could do any more damage, one assumes - to take control of education.

Once again he quickly showed quite exceptional skill in what corporate and business school wankers would call his core competencies - misrepresentation and poor judgement. It took less than no time for him and his "team" to screw up all the exam results and deny either a) having anything to do with it or b) even knowing anything about it. What was really funny was that they were also paying someone who wasn't even living in the country shed-loads of cash to oversee things.

To be fair to our Ed, saying he didn't know what was happening was pretty convincing, since he yields to none in his combination of utter certainty and total ignorance. And he certainly cannot be faulted on the grounds of inconsistency, as his latest, astoundingly stupid wheeze is suggest that the best place to save public money right now is on education.

To say that British education is in a mess is an understatement of such majesty that I am almost but not quite lost for words. So degraded have standards become that the kind of questions I was expected to answer at the age of ten - like "who was Julius Caesar and when did he come to Britain" - are now deemed beyond the reach of university undergraduates.

So shamelessly have the figures been massaged that it is claimed things are getting better. But most of us know full well that education is one of the few areas where if anything more money is called for, not less. No wonder Ed's latest idea has all the teachers (many of them natural labour supporters, by the way) in a rage and, of course, the Conservatives in a state of orgasmic rapture.

Here's a way to save money, though. Every quango and consultant should be required within four weeks to prove in a document no more than ten pages long that what they do provides a direct economic benefit that exceeds their cost. And, in areas like education, defence, crime and health two ratios should be keenly scrutinised: the one between administrators and deliverers; and between time spent delivering and the time spent doing other things.

Oh, and Ed Balls should be made to get a proper job. That is to say, nothing to do with lobbying or PR or with any organisation that has had business from any of the departments he has helped to mismanage.