Yesterday we witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of the Home Secretary, the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney-General begging judges not to jail any but the most dangerous criminals, because there is nowhere to put them. The Treasury was warned for years that it needed to build more prisons. It refused. The Home Office invented a host of jail-avoidance strategies — cautions for muggers, community sentences for burglars, early release for rapists — that have only generated more crime. Yet John Reid looks bemused, and says that 8,000 extra jail places will become available by 2012.

On Friday we watched Patricia Hewitt wondering aloud why GPs had got such a large pay rise, 63 per cent over three years, which has contributed to the NHS’s plunge into the red. “I think if we had anticipated this business of GPs taking a higher share of income in profits we would have wanted to do something,” she said. It wouldn’t have taken much to predict, just a basic understanding of human nature.

There is no doubt that Mr Reid and Ms Hewitt each inherited a mess. That both are saying so — less and less discreetly — shows how dangerously thin the notion of collective Cabinet responsibility has become under Mr Blair’s presidency and now his twilight. It also emphasises just how destructive is the merry-go-round on which ministers are repeatedly reshuffled.

But civil servants cannot take all the blame. Decision-making processes have been flawed at the highest level. The decision to do nothing in the face of a growing prison population was deliberate, and taken at Cabinet level. The failure to estimate correctly the wage bill for GPs, consultants and, indeed, teachers — whose extra costs the Government tried to pass on to local authorities two years ago, driving up council tax — were basic management errors for which heads should have rolled.

Overwhelmed as they are, there is one thing that all ministers have known for some time: that the money would run out. The Treasury has made it quite clear for more than a year that public spending growth will slow down significantly. Yet as the tide of money begins to go out, leaving half-baked policies exposed, ambitious ministers are flapping as though completely stranded.

It is easy to placate lobbies with money, or the promise of more, but tighter budgets are an instant red rag. So the Royal Navy is screaming about having to mothball half of its warships. Local people are campaigning to save hospitals. PFI building programmes are halted on the drawing board. But why? All this could have been anticipated. Some projects that will now be cut should never have been created. But perhaps this Government has spent so long flaunting expenditure figures as proof of “progress” that it has felt unable to dampen expectations.

Money should never have been seen as a substitute for management. Basic management involves, among other things, rewarding good performance and rooting out the bad. Ministers had a golden opportunity to link pay to performance when they were flush with cash. But the drive to do so was fudged in both schools and hospitals.

GPs are a classic example. The Government has boosted their average pay to £118,000 a year, while simultaneously reducing their workload to weekdays only. Hence my fury this week when the post brought me an NHS questionnaire about my local practice. I was hoping this would give me a chance to express my views on the quality of care. But no. All ten questions were about how easy or difficult it is for me to get an appointment.

Well, of course it’s not easy to get an appointment. It was always difficult to see the good doctor. Everyone wants to see him rather than the bad doctor, whose prescriptions regularly have to be rewritten by the exasperated pharmacist. Now it is almost impossible to see either. Have ministers forgotten that they relieved GPs of the duty to care for patients at nights and weekends? Do they really think we have forgotten too?

The most surprising thing about so many intelligent politicians is their failure to realise how much the public sees through them. We all knew community sentences wouldn’t deter criminals. We all expected the Olympics would go over budget. We all knew that they knew these things, at least we assumed they did. Maybe they didn’t.

It is dangerous to underestimate the public’s common sense. Every minister should read the recently published research into the Jubilee Line fraud trial, which collapsed in 2005 after two years. The Crown Prosecution Service is clearly amazed to find that the jurors had “a good grasp of the evidence” in this highly complex case and showed “impressive familiarity” with the issues even months later. The jurors were furious at being “treated like children”. Who knows how patronised they feel now that the Attorney-General is using this case as an excuse to scrap juries in complex fraud trials altogether.

Why does government so often overlook the obvious? One answer must be that this regime is overwhelmed by its own voluminous legislation, which is so often counter-productive. I doubt that Ms Hewitt is amused by the GPs’ latest call for gambling addicts to be treated on the NHS. It is a bitter irony that the numbers of addicts will be greatly swollen by the Cabinet’s own casino policy.

Times Recommends

• And lo, he ventured forth . . .
• Lying to your children isn't a crime
• A single way to improve IVF treatment