Not badly written but did not catch my interest. Events parochial, petty and pathetic. Do you really want to spend time on Blue Streak, or pension mis-selling, or the Poll Tax mess? I've got into Big History lately - this is more like looking down a microscope at events with little or no importance. The Brexit fiasco is foreshadowed to a degree, but at least that is likely to reverberate for a decade or two. ( )

At the risk of succumbing to cliché, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry … or scream in rage and frustration … or (as a career civil servant) simply hang my head in shame for the failings of my caste.

Professor Anthony King and Sir Ivor Crewe have compiled a highly entertaining anthology of governmental incompetence drawn from the three decades from Margaret Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street to the general election in May 2010 that brought down the curtain on the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They are also exemplary in their even-handedness, and there is no hint of a partisan stance in their exposition of the array of blunders that they include in their selection. There is no hint from reading their accounts where their own political allegiances lie.

They are also gracious enough to concede that the cast of Ministers and Prime Ministers, whom they ruthlessly (and rightly) pillory both for their short-sightedness and their oblivion to precedent or advice, did also achieve considerable and lasting successes during their respective times in office. I draw some scant relief from the fact that they generally place the blame squarely on the shoulders of ministers' failure to undertake sufficient reviews during the initial formulation of policy. Officials (i.e. civil servants) are clearly not entirely blameless, but they are assigned less of the responsibility than their ministerial overlords. ['Phew! That was close!]

The opening section is devoted to a definition of what King and Crewe consider constitutes a blunder, and this is then followed with a dispassionate explanation of how ten of the greatest blunders of that period came to pass. The third section explores the various causes of these astounding blunders, while the final section considers how they might have been avoided.

The descriptions of the blunders are simultaneously amusing and enraging. Some of the woeful tales seem desperately reminiscent of some of the more outlandish episodes of 'Yes Minister', and have the reader sniggering along until he suddenly remembers that, as a beleaguered taxpayer, he or she had been paying for it.

The blunders under review are varied in their scope but frighteningly similar in their woeful waste of public money that might, if wiser counsels had prevailed, have been utilised to far greater benefit. It is interesting to see how completely several of these scandals had faded from memory, even though they had been the subject of huge public outrage at the time. Some of them remain more prominently in the memory than others (the poll tax fiasco during the early 1900s being a prime example), though the debacle of the Rural Payments Agency, presided over with imperious incompetence by Margaret Beckett had slipped my mind.

Very few Whitehall departments escape unscathed, and the Department for Education and Employment (forerunner of my own former employer, the Department for Education) was guilty of one of the more ludicrous embarrassments - the ill-fated attempt to introduce individual learning accounts at the start of the current millennium. Indeed, while that woeful escapade had occurred before I joined the department [Phew, again – nothing to do with me, guvnor!], I remember the coverage of our Permanent Secretary, David (later Sir David) Normington, squirming before the steely gaze of the Public Accounts Committee as the found himself unable to explain why some of the more ridiculous decisions had been taken. To be fair to Sir David, like me, he had only joined the department after the decision had been taken to terminate the programme and put it out of everyone’s misery. A link to the footage of Normington’s appearance before the PAC was placed on the front page of the finance guidance section of the department’s intranet as a reminder of why proper modelling, detailed research and rigorous risk assessment were required when making any commitments with public money. Perhaps they should have had a desktop icon of a stable door swinging open.

The accounts of the various debacles are detailed without being at all inaccessible. I was left wishing that Ministers had been given a similar volume as a handbook of what might, so easily, go astray with even the best-intended policies. ( )

This book is a study of blunders made by UK governments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The authors take a very specific view of what constitutes a "blunder", so certain issues such as the banning of trade unions at GCHQ are not covered, even when such an action has been identified by many commentators, international courts and successive governments as illegal.

Instead, 'blunders' are identified as bad decisions, made for the wrong reasons, that ended up costing the taxpayer serious money. In this, the authors claim not to take a partisan view. Indeed, they take an entire chapter early on to talk about the successes of various governments over the same period. Their view of what constitutes a "success", of course, may in itself seem quite partisan. Later in the book, they talk about various causes of blundering, and identify 'group-think' as one such factor. Yet they themselves fall into the same trap, especially when writing about the British political Left and some of its more extreme manifestations, their very language betrays their underlying viewpoint and their acceptance of the consensus 'group think'.

They speak of the 'cultural disconnect', a more fundamental form of 'group-think', where a group of people from similar backgrounds all share the same world-view and cannot conceive that other people in quite different situations would not have the same world-view. Yet they display precisely that same behaviour. They are academics specialising in modern history and politics, working in the early years of the 21st Century. They assume, for instance, that the trade unions of the 1970s and 1980s were over-powerful and over-bearing. Yet to the members of those unions, they were merely working to advance the cause of those members over - or at least alongside - the cause of the employer. Even today, I heard a Minister on the news complaining that striking rail workers had a duty to "think of the passengers". Their cultural disconnect prevented them from thinking as a rank-and-file trade union member who pays their subscriptions and expect the union to support their grievances. To them, the duty of the union is to think of its members, not everyone else.

Be that as it may; after the introductory chapters, the authors then describe a number of political decisions and events that turned out badly. They do not apportion blame in those chapters, but then carry on, in the third section of the book, to look at a number of causes for blunders and apply them to the examples they quoted. This structure does force me to my major stylistic criticism of the book. By looking at specific causal factors, they build into their narrative a fair amount of duplication, especially as the range of blunders they are examining is distinctly limited. To be told for the fourth or fifth time "The failure of the poll tax can be put down to..." does get a little repetitive.

Although the authors are experts in their field, there are instances where I have been able to identify areas where they were not in full possession of the facts, and indeed the odd place where I thought "Ah, if they'd seen what I saw, they'd think slightly differently". But these were not frequent objections. After all, I was only ever peripherally involved in some of these issues, or heard about them at third hand, admittedly from someone who really was there, not just hearing it at second hand themselves. And the overall impact of these changes wouldn't have changed the main thrust of the book, though the one instance I can think of does work a little against them. In the section where they speak of the cultural disconnect between the political class - MPs, Lords and senior civil servants - they generalise that these people are now all cut from the same cloth. Certainly, the number of MPs who now can boast serious life experience in commerce or public-facing front-line services is massively decreased from what it once was. But one of the few officials they name, Sir Terry Heiser, Permanent Secretary at the Department of the Environment at the time of the Poll Tax, is an exception to the rule; he was the last Permanent Secretary to have started his Civil Service career in the lowly role of Messenger. And they also miss the fact that some of the Ministerial portfolios people have been responsible for have meant that often, Ministers have to keep a lot of plates spinning at once. Again, looking at the DoE in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a whole tranche of issues occupying the minds of the department that would have diverted attention away from the Poll Tax. For example, from where I was sat, in the water regulator's office Ofwat, we were mainly concerned with the industry taking a more outward-looking view towards customer service and customer expectations, whilst at the same time engaging in a massive capital investment programme and looking at the impact of EU legislation in both urban waste water, drinking water standards, and wider environmental impact legislation.

Originally, the book ended its narrative in 2010 with the replacement of Gordon Brown's Labour administration with the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron. The edition of the book that I was reading was published a year after its original publication, and included an Epilogue covering the Coalition Government's record up to July 2014. It is no less appalling than the story up to 2010. University tuition fees, Universal Credit, the performance of the private sector in fulfilling outsourced public sector contracts - especially the performance of G4S over providing security for the 2012 Olympics - are just a few of the blunders that the authors identify, and they finished by listing seven issues or policies that had the potential, in their eyes, to turn into future blunders. Again, they differentiate between a blunder and merely bad decisions, and give credit where it is due, for the overall success of the London Olympics and the introduction of same-sex marriages. The Epilogue was too late for the EU membership referendum of 2016, which I suspect will be put down as a major blunder in future years, irrespective of which side of that particular argument you were on. But it is way too early to reach any firm assessment as to the overall effect of 'Brexit'. After all, Mao Zedong, leader of Communist China, was once asked what he thought the effects were of the French Revolution; and after some deliberation, he opined that it was "too soon to tell".

At the end of the day - and the book - though, the conclusions are telling. They identify a whole slew of issues endemic in the British political system. They also graze the surface of one - the politicisation of the Civil Service under Margaret Thatcher. Although they allude to this, they do not examine it in depth. This is a fairly hefty omission. They mainly reserve most of their criticism for the political landscape of the UK, in particular the "winner takes all" view of our entire system, a system that seems intended to cause divisions and conflict. We only have to look at the EU Referendum result. Of the roughly 33 million votes cast, 17 million voted out and 16 million voted in. Yet the attitude of most of the 'Brexiteers' is "Ha, ha, we won, so suck it up, Remainder losers!" Our normal political processes are similar: a Government can come to power with a majority of the seats in the House of Commons but, due to their geographical and demographic make-up, that Government may not enjoy the support of the majority of voters in the country based on pure head count.

These recipes for conflict and division drive the attitude of Governments towards decisions, best summed up in the 'Yes Minister' joke: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it.". And perhaps this is the one big place where the authors pull their punches. It is difficult to avoid the impression that it is our entire British political system that will result in successive Governments making blunders; and that effective, efficient Government would really demand that our entire political system should be torn up and replaced with something better. The authors give us a number of portraits of instances where other countries' legislatures and executives would have done differently. But as Churchill is reputed to have said "Democracy is perhaps the worst possible form of Government - except for all the others." If that be so, then possibly the sort of blunders Governments make are the price we have to pay for living where we do, with the political settlement we have. How we could ever force any change or improvement, what we would want such a Government to look like and behave, and (perhaps the one thing any radical or revolutionary never thinks about), how we get There from Here, is a whole set of other questions whose answers we might not like. ( )

This book was recommended to me and colleagues on a policy making workshop I attended last month. It examines a range of "blunders" committed by governments of all political parties since the 1980s (starting from the poll tax), blunders in this case being defined as: significant policies or initiatives that failed to deliver most of their objectives, or which delivered some of them but at excessive cost, usually exceeding any financial savings made; and independent of whether the authors or the reader may approve or disapprove of the objectives in question. Unlike some other books in a similar vein, it doesn't just present these examples in an "aren't all politicians stupid" tabloid style, but tries to get to the heart of the systemic faults that caused the failure of policies or initiatives that in nearly all cases had rational and decent aims at their core at the outset, but which failed in their implementation in terms of unclear objectives, poor management or unclear lines of accountability, or a failure to take into account perverse consequences arising from the implementation.

Just over half of the book deals with the blunders themselves, some of the most damaging in human and/or cost terms probably being the poll tax, pensions mis-selling, the Child Support Agency, the Tube public-private partnership and the numerous failed IT projects under all recent governments. Most of the rest of the book analyses common features of these blunders, such as cultural disconnect and group think (small groups of Ministers, advisers or civil servants developing policies without challenge from outsiders, reinforcing each others' assumptions and maybe prejudices); operational disconnect (lack of "joined-upness" between policy and delivery); spin and symbolism; too frequent changes of lead Minister or civil servant project managers/senior responsible owners leading to poor management; and, among others, Ministerial activism, their desire always to be seen to be doing and acting at speed, rapid pace often being privileged over deliberation (the media is often to blame for encouraging this, of course).

The book is probably a bit too long, and could benefit from a little editing. Nevertheless, it is a worthy and important book, which should be studied by all civil servants involved in policy or delivery at all grades, and by all Ministers and any politician aspiring in future to Ministerial office. ( )

Professor Anthony King and Sir Ivor Crewe have compiled a highly entertaining anthology of governmental incompetence over the three decades from Margaret Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street to the last general election in May 2010. They are also exemplary in their even-handedness: they do not adopt a partisan stance in their exposition of the array of blunders that they include in this selection, and they do concede that the cast of Ministers and Prime Ministers whom they describe did also achieve and lasting successes during their respective times in office. The blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of ministers' failure to undertake sufficient reviews during the initial formulation of policy. Officials (i.e. civil servants) are not blameless but they are assigned less of the responsibility than their ministerial overlords. ['Phew! That was close!]

The opening section is devoted to a definition of what they consider constitutes a blunder, and this is then followed with a dispassionate explanation of how ten of the greatest blunders of that period came to pass. The third section various causes of these astounding blunders, while the final section considers how they might have been avoided.

The descriptions of the blunders are simultaneously amusing and enraging. Some of the woeful tales seem desperately reminiscent of some of the more outlandish episodes of 'Yes Minister', and have the reader sniggering along until he suddenly remembers that, as a beleaguered taxpayer, he had been paying for all of it.

The blunders under review are varied in their scope but frighteningly similar in their woeful waste of public money that might, if wiser councils had prevailed, have been utilised to far greater benefit. It is interesting to see how completely of these scandals had faded from memory, even though they had been the subject of huge public outrage at the time. Some of them remain more prominently in the memory than others (the poll tax fiasco during the early 1900s being a prime example), though the debacle of the Rural Payments Agency, presided over with imperious incompetence by Margaret Beckett had slipped my mind.

Very few Whitehall departments escape unscathed, and the Department for Education and Employment (forerunner of my own Department for Education) was guilty of one of the greater escapades - the ill-fated attempt to introduce individual learning accounts at the start of the current millennium.

The accounts are detailed without being at all inaccessible. One is left wishing that Ministers had been given a similar volume as a handbook of what might, so easily, go astray with even the best-intended policies. ( )