Dear Prime Minister

12:03pm Tuesday 13th May 2008

I DO sympathise. First Lord Levy had a go at you. Then along came Cherie in her memoirs - closely followed by John "two loos" Prescott.

Now Frank Field, an honest and decent man if ever there was one, comes on the wireless to tell us all what a lousy temper you have and how you regularly fly into rages.

Frank says you are unhappy. I can't say I'm surprised.

But sympathy for your plight must be tempered with judgement. I mean, haven't you rather brought all this misery upon yourself?

Never mind the 10p tax fiasco by which you appeared to us as a Labour politician punishing the poor. The rest of your record, over the long period when you were Chancellor and over what looks increasingly like the very short time you'll spend in the office of Prime Minister, is a catalogue of misjudgements and mistakes.

Do you remember when you sold off the nation's gold reserves when gold was a fraction of the price it is today? Or how about the wonderful wheeze of doubling council tax over your ten years at the top?

Why have you cheated the public by going back on your promise to hold a referendum over the Treaty of Lisbon? Why are you systematically cheating us by producing figures which say inflation is only two and a half per cent, when we all know prices across the board and going up at four or five times that rate?

WHY all those stealth taxes that are making us one of the most heavilytaxed countries in the Western world?

We wouldn't mind so much paying high taxes if we could see results from them. But the NHS is a shambles and "state education" is a contradiction in terms. We are paying the highest fuel taxes in Europe, yet we have the worst road system. Your way of arranging criminal justice laws is such that career terrorists escape prosecution or deportation - through your politically- correct and highly dangerous Human Rights Act.

Your crime figures are a pile of porkies, because they omit some of the worst and most violent crimes from the reckoning. You and your New Labour cronies have spent ten years turning the nanny state (bad enough in itself) into a surveillance state that Big Brother or the Stasi would have been proud of.

We have more tax and worse public services.

We have more law and less liberty. We have more government and fewer genuine choices.

Instead of the judicious introduction of a few intelligent practical policies for the good of the nation as a whole, we have an endless parade of gimmicks, novelties and "initiatives". But real initiative is another of the qualities your government just doesn't have. Among your crackpot schemes is the purloining of agricultural land to produce biofuels, because of your obsession with the fantasy of global warming.

And this at the very time we are seeing food shortages worldwide.

As I say, I do sympathise. But as a son of the manse you know very well that there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. There is one way you could redeem yourself even at this late stage: call a general election and let the people give their verdict on the most incompetent, wretched government in a century. But I guess you won't. By the way, that sound you hear is not me laughing. It's Tony Blair.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

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