When the history of this government is written, the point that will baffle everyone will be: Iain Duncan Smith. Why?

On New Year’s Day, it turned out that the Universal Credit system fails to get the right bank account 25% of the time.

In March, the project’s director was replaced again.

The fear was such that they scaled the pilot project down again, and again, until it launched as a real-life implementation of Yes, Minister‘s hospital with no patients.

The soaring ambition didn’t suffer, though, and he still wanted to spy on all the computers.

And, six months after the 25% failure rate, even Francis Maude can see it’s fucked.

Meanwhile, he got caught fiddling the statistics, again and again and again. As Watching A4e says, can we afford Iain Duncan Smith?

Then there was the idea of making crisis loans a secret, the constant kickings from the courts, the payment by results system whose results are so awful that it saved £248 million in payments, and the huge flagship policy initiative that managed to place zero people in jobs in most of the areas it rolled out in. Seriously. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Jack shit.

And then, of course, there’s the whole, vast, third independent disaster of the bedroom tax. The evictions have begun, and here is a real doozy of a bureaucratic fiasco. I mean, you have no idea until you’ve seen this.

If you’re drawing Universal Credit, and you have to pay a service charge on your home – for example, if it’s an ex-local authority flat, quite a significant point – the Man from the Ministry has to decide which elements of it are “eligible” or “ineligible” service charges, and do a cost-allocation of the janitor’s time spent on each category of charges. Apparently, they are advised to ask the managing agent. Who can then turn around and bill you for it. But all is not lost, as you can include the agent’s fees in the cost of housing for UC purposes, but only in so far as they relate to eligible service charges.

Presumably, you then need to allocate the increase in the fees on the same basis, and the cost of this exercise can be re-billed in the same way, in literally ever-decreasing circles of fantasy accounting.

It gets better. Anything involving “the installation and maintenance of disability equipment and adaptions” is ineligible. I can only imagine that the DWP civil servants are hoping to trip him up now, as it’s blindingly obvious that someone will demand judicial review of this on grounds of discrimination. But aren’t public authorities required by law to ensure their buildings are accessible?

More to the point, isn’t this the most perfectly ridiculous bit of bureaucratic meddling you can imagine? The minister insists on having every caretaker in Britain’s timesheet, NOW.

Or he’ll thcream and thcream until he’s thick.

Mr Duncan Smith lost his temper when he heard a member of his team rowing on the phone with a Treasury official. He grabbed the receiver and shouted down the line: ‘If you ever speak to my officials like that again I’ll bite your balls off and send them to you in a box.’

And of course the policy is itself hideously idiotic; if we’re in a global race, forcing people to take the first daft no-wage placement offered is madness, and trying to mimic one monthly salary per family has all kinds of problems of its own, and the political lead seems to be providing cover for cops and others who want to substitute hating the poor for racism that is no longer acceptable.

But none of this should be at all surprising. Here’s a sample of IDS’s judgment from 1994.

The reforms ought to go wider still. We should learn from the success of the 15 million people who have opted out of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) and abolish it altogether. The public has a greater choice and better service with private pension schemes, the State’s record is abysmal.

Yes. Yes. Contracting-out was such a triumph wasn’t it? Then of course, there’s the bullshitting and the fake CV.

I think, in general, it’s the bullshit that’s the tell here; Alan Watkins wrote, years ago when IDS was the Tory leader, that it was a mistake to see him as a cipher, a man without qualities. Instead, Watkins wrote, he reminded him of people he saw in Fitzrovia pubs in the 1950s, typically ex-RAF officers who went into the motor or wine trades, always getting into unlikely scrapes and trying on bizarre money-making schemes, the best possible of which would be to marry a heiress. And of course he did. Terribly, the Indy‘s new website only has Watkins’ columns back to 2006.

The character Watkins was sketching was, of course, a prize bullshitter and chancer. Also, we have a word for exactly that character: a spiv.

He threw his hat in the ring for Tory leader because why not, in the same way as you might fill the Jensen with undeclared vintages and hope they sold like they tasted better than they looked to Customs, or get Virginia to take you ski-ing in St. Moritz so you could fill your old Erskine with watches for resale at the St. Moritz in Soho. He got it because all the other candidates had a substantial negative following of enemies. He decided he had a social conscience because, again, nobody else was doing it and why not? Unfortunately, if you want to have a social conscience in Britain you also need the bureaucratic gift, and we see the consequences.

But what service does he provide to the Tories? Why? Literally no other minister generates such a constant flow of terrible news. But he is allowed, alone among ministers, to tell the Treasury to bugger off, to threaten its officials, to refuse Downing Street staff access to the DWP officers. In British politics, Winston Churchill gets to tell the Chancellor to bugger off, just as Madonna gets copy approval and you aren’t, as my old editor once said.

Why on earth hasn’t he been offered a cheap ticket to Canada and a pat on the back yet, thinking of Watkins’s characterisation?

I think the explanation is this: IDS was the first of the few. He integrated the Tories, the first pure chancer who opened the way for the broader chancerisation of the party. The amazing variety of PowerPoint divas, OK-ish opinion journalists, cupcake peddlers, and general-purpose availability entrepreneurs who now rule us all emerged in Tory politics post-IDS, and they respect him as the chancer icon who blazed the trail.

Update: And I didn’t even mention the novel! IDS is the Great Crapsby, indeed.

The prime minister is a godawful cricketer, and the way you can tell is that he’s trying to show technique when just moving your feet and whacking the fucker would do far better.

PM takes on future generation of Indian cricketers at Mumbai’s Maidan. England Women’s coach here too. #PMIndia twitter.com/Number10press/…

— No. 10 Press Office(@Number10press) February 18, 2013

His head isn’t over the ball, his eyes aren’t on the ball, he’s forward while playing a back foot stroke, his gate is a mile wide. If he wasn’t trying to look like a cricketer, he could just have watched it and hoicked it over midwicket, but that’s not our man.

He’s stopped wearing the shiny shoes, but he’s wearing black trousers and a navy blue shirt on an Indian cricket oval in the southern summer. Jesus, what a mess.

Compare the man who would be king.

Boris Johnson is fat, ungainly, but he actually moves to the length. He’s taken a step out of the line, but he seems to be in the West Indies, and nobody told Viv Richards off for hitting to leg too much. He looks a bit like a baseball hitter, but if he gets a hit in the sweet spot it’s going for the boundary, and he’s watching the ball like a hawk.

And most of all, he looks like he likes being a human. Cameron looks like the Onion joke about Mitt Romney turning into a dollar bill, or rather he looks like a small bank playing a man on TV.

That said, Johnson the cricketer looks like the classic hooker – two men behind deep-square leg, guvnor, and we’ll bounce him out. He’s more than likely to hole out embarrassingly down to cow corner, or else swirling up over the stumps for the wicketkeeper.

Cameron will be out bowled or lbw, due to his terrible moves, Johnson will be caught in the deep due to his lack of judgment.

Fraser Nelson apparently believes he has some standing to complain about other people’s accounting. He is very angry about a Tory party political broadcast in which he says David Cameron “tells porkies”. In fact I count 12 occasions in which he accuses the prime minister of lying. Further, he says:

Financiers are, quite literally, prosecuted for this kind of thing.

This sudden attack of rectitude is highly noticeable.

Here is Fraser Nelson trying to claim that the UK’s debt to GDP ratio in 2008 was 400%. I think what he did was including all the UK banking system’s short-term paper, ignoring all its assets, and not netting-out liabilities between UK businesses.

Here is Fraser Nelson deciding that hang the ONS and Eurostat, he’ll decide to count PFI payments as part of the national debt.

Apparently it was OK when the Tories did it, but not when Labour did it.

Here is Fraser Nelson promising that it’s even worserer, and the national accounts will actually turn out worse than the forecasts. This isn’t dishonest, just wrong; in the spring of 2010, the PSNCR repeatedly turned out better than forecast, which could have been and was predicted as the forecasts were based on Q4 2008 figures.

Here’s Fraser Nelson in December 2009 saying that the UK has joined Zimbabwe by printing money. He could have said that we’d joined the United States of America, too.

Here he is trying to count household debts in with the government deficit.

Here’s Fraser Nelson deciding to count in the debts (but not the assets) of the banks and a large sum of pension liabilities, fairly transparently in order to get to a figure of 100% of GDP, although why you’d bother if you’d already achieved 400% is beyond me.

And here’s the big finish: in the same piece he declares that the debt is more than Italy’s, is 400% of GDP, and then:

What will be more worrying is that, uniquely, most of Britain’s debt is short-term. This broke country must somehow repay most of this debt before next Christmas. And if it can’t? Then we really do get to apocalypse now: Britain losing its AAA credit rating and possibly seeking IMF bail-out because no one else will lend at anything below loan shark rates.

The average maturity of UK government debt was 14 years at the time, and he seems to be talking about government debt, although you’re never sure with Nelson what bullshit pseudonumber he’s pulled out of his arse this minute.

The worst of it is the yelling “Fire!” in the crowded theatre. No. It wasn’t yelling “Fire!”, it was yelling “Flood! Terrorists! Earthquake! Zombies! Anything but fire! Fire is impossible!” Most of these links are from the winter of 2008, when panic-mongering could really have had serious consequences.

Well, perhaps he’s changed his mind? Jeune pute, vieille sainte as the French say? I don’t think so. If he and his rag were in better odour with the Tory leadership, he’d be out there banging the drum for George Osborne. Instead, he’s seen the signs and is desperately sucking up to Boris Johnson, the king over the water. He is simply a political hack who would say anything to serve his career.

Oh yes, as a reward for patience, here’s another example of his judgment.

Barack Hussein Obama, president of America, died last night aged 96 at his family home in Jakarta. His one-term presidency coincided with the American debt crisis, which ended its status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

Yeah well, tell it to bin Laden…

Sunny Hundal has a go at this rather floppy interview with Paul Staines. The interesting bit is right at the finish:

“I think the internet means you can raise funds online in a different way. Labour goes to the union barons to get big cash-flows; the Tories go to the City. But I think the internet means they can get thousands of small donations. I know a lot about people online – you can raise money. If you raise money, have a parallel organisation, you can have much more influence. And that’s where I see us going.”

Well, a more penetrating inquiry might have raised the point that Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign is not really news in 2013, or even, for advanced students, that Howard Dean’s 2003-2004 insurgency in the Democratic Party is a full ten years ago, and that MoveOn has been going for even longer than that, and that it is depressing that you can still come across as Future Boy! just by babbling some guff about online fundraising.

Further, you might well ask why Paul Staines would be the man to do it. One thing he has never done is run a membership organisation, which is what this is. Another thing he has never done is develop software or manage software developers, which is what such a project would require. And yet a third thing he doesn’t really do is the sort of commitment to professionalism and meticulous accounting such a project would need, both to make it work, and also to make it legal. The reporting requirements of the Electoral Commission are quite stringent, and given his profile on the interwebs, I would think he would be the subject of intense and detailed scrutiny – I mean, I know he would, because I’d do it myself.

I doubt the Tories will get very much money out of this. However, I do suspect that some sort of half-baked, Louise Mensch and Luke Bozier take on Twitter, effort might actually appear. Here’s why.

The United States has a small industry of political fundraising consultants whose business model works as follows; your mate the political strategy consultant gets hired by a no-name candidate, who’s been told by your mate the politician that they need the strategist, and recommends you to raise the wind. You accept, and bill the campaign for your expenses plus a percentage of the take. Sometimes, your overall share may be as much as two-thirds of the cash you bring in.

The palooka loses. But you and your mate the consultant and your other mates the media buyers and so on and so forth get paid. The donors are happy, because they got their tax write-off, and they showed the serious politicos that they were real support, people who come through for the shitty campaigns. And perhaps even the palooka ain’t so dumb after all. The classic way to get a winnable nomination is, of course, to take one for the team and demonstrate your loyalty. But it’s hard to tell that apart from just being a sucker.

The Tories are probably too cute for that; they do reptile politics, by analogy to the reptilian brain, well, and I can’t see them getting that desperate for cash. But what about UKIP, say? Plenty of glibertarian clicktivists and plenty of no-hopers, not poor but not Ashcroft-funded.

If this government had an aesthetic, it would be the YBAs’; sheep chopped in half in formaldehyde, everyone I’ve ever slept with, yadda yadda. Being “shocking”, in a highly conservative and derivative way. I submit that it is no coincidence that their biggest patron was Maurice Saatchi.

Of course the great threat to the professionally shocking is that you chainsaw your frozen sheep and everyone yawns. It’s basically just trolling, and it takes actual talent to keep trolling fresh.

However, the quality standards of the political world make the ready-meal industry look professional. I mean, it’s not as if Iain Duncan Smith’s term as Tory leader is beyond living memory. He was not just a poor Tory leader, he was a disastrous one, and he was a ridiculous one.

And he seems to have been completely rehabilitated in the eyes of the elite because of his wanktank and his overfamous trip to Easterhouse. That was all it took.

Of course, his detour via the West of Scotland was probably actually a negative contribution to his abilities. During the boom, the people and problems he encountered tended to be those who actually might have needed structured intervention from the social services industry, rather than just being unemployed. People who might have been simply out of work were in work. The problems of a society with a 40-odd million-strong workforce and less than a million unemployed are not the same ones as those of a society with 3 million unemployed.

Similarly, his interlocutors tended to be people interested in providing such structured intervention, with the predictable result that he came away thinking they ought to do it. The “third sector” was basically a product of efforts to deal with the long-term consequences of the macroeconomic policies of the 1980s. A4E’s history is the Rosetta stone here.

This seems to have de-trained people across the political spectrum in dealing with mass unemployment when it re-appeared in 2008; Liam Byrne and James Purnell were also confused.

The depressing thing, though, is that this bit of trivial and counterproductive imagemaking salvaged him from the scrapheap and boosted him all the way to the Cabinet. It certainly worked for one unemployed man, I suppose.

The woman who I am obliged to call “Crazy” Janet Daley is making sense:

So what must we conclude? That, if anything, he [the prime minister] may be too facile with language and arguments? That, like a very bright but vaguely lazy student, he can pull out a gifted verbal performance when it is absolutely necessary – when his political life depends on it – only to slip back into haphazard sloppiness when the crisis is past? That the party leadership is talented but fundamentally unserious?

Yes, yes, and yes, but so late! Checking back, I started calling him “Dave from PR” in May, 2006.