Should he resign or not? There is only one thing for sure about the fate of London’s top policeman after last week’s guilty verdict over the de Menezes shooting. It is that accountability in British public administration has collapsed.

Every 10 days Britain’s police kill someone by crashing their cars. Of those deaths, 21 in the past two years were of people unconnected with any chase and who were innocent of any crime. They were victims of “response time” targets set for each force by the Home Office, which is why the number of police crashes increases each year.

There has been no high profile health and safety inquiry into these deaths, each one as tragic for the bereaved as that of de Menezes. Is the police driver to blame, or the operational commander, or perhaps the home secretary?

Car crashes are presumably seen as accidents, unlike shooting people in the head. Yet both are the outcome of operations designed to protect the public that went disastrously wrong. To regard a chief constable as responsible for a death by shooting but not by car-crashing requires a high degree of culpability to attach to him.

The de Menezes affair appears to have been a shambles from start to finish and continues to be. After the July 7 London bombs the public assumed that a rigorous procedure was in place for watching and apprehending suspects. This was clearly not the case. Nineteen charges were laid at the police’s door by the Old Bailey prosecutors, yet the police refused to concede that anything had gone wrong, beyond what might be termed a catastrophic accident.

That said, the police were understandably desperate not to have health and safety officials tell them, through a judge, how to manage sensitive counter-terrorism operations. On their basis, as Sir Ian Blair pointed out, if his unarmed officers had been blown up by tackling a bomber before he entered the Tube, the police would also have been prosecuted for letting them take the risk. Lord Stevens, Blair’s predecessor, found himself in the dock at the Old Bailey in 2002 on just such a charge, courtesy of the Health and Safety Executive.

Pursuing a criminal negligence charge against the “office” of the police commissioner - over an incident when all London’s safety was at risk - contrived to stall the inquest, postpone an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report and halt any action by the de Menezes family. It forced the police into extreme defence mode, refusing to admit fault for fear of aiding the prosecution and abetting a future suit for damages. The British judicial system can be rotten.

We are still no nearer to knowing who or what was at fault. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) turned what should have been a meticulous (and swift) investigative inquiry into a £3m adversarial spectacular before a jury. The two men who killed de Menezes were not even called to give evidence. Fining the taxpayer, via the police, neither rectified any damage nor offered any incentive to better performance. The whole farrago carries more than a hint of officials using the criminal law, not for any public good, but to line the pockets of a rampant health-and-safety inspection and equipment industry.

The government of Britain’s police has been in turmoil since Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard tried to bring it under Whitehall command in 1993. Parliament stopped them but every home secretary since has been straining for the same goal. Not one of the 43 provincial forces has known whether it will exist a year hence. The only policy has been of drift and incompetence. Two years ago the Home Office even set up its own “FBI”, the 4,000-strong Serious Organised Crime Agency, blowing £400m in what appears to have been a bureaucratic fiasco. The body is reportedly close to collapse.

As for the Home Office’s thesis that it is uniquely competent to manage the rest of the nation’s police, the one force it managed throughout the 20th century, the Met, long featured as the least efficient in Britain. The fact that London officers still refuse to patrol any street single-handed, as once they did, shows how far the unions run the management.

Formal responsibility for the Met was moved in 2000 from the home secretary to the elected citizens of London. But it was only half moved. The home secretary still appoints the commissioner, the mayor provides his budget, the Metropolitan Police Authority determines “nonoperational” policy and the Home Office meddles every day of the week with some headline-grabbing initiative.

It is a racing certainty that if a terrorist had indeed been shot in Stockwell that 2005 morning, not just the police but Tony Blair, the then home secretary Charles Clarke, Ken Livingstone, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all would have claimed the credit. British accountability means that everyone is responsible when things go right and nobody when they go wrong.

Success has a hundred fathers, failure is an orphan.

The truth is that the gigantism now infecting Britain’s public sector has thoroughly tangled lines of political and institutional responsibility. Should Gordon Brown have resigned for wasting £2 billion with his tax credits? Should Tessa Jowell have resigned over her fraudulent Olympics estimates, costing the public an extra £6 billion and rising? Should Jacqui Smith resign over last week’s dud immigration figures?

Who bears responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Britons from hospital infections, almost certainly the result of the privatisation of cleaning services? Should it be the Tory health ministers who instituted the policy or Labour ministers who failed to reverse it? When should “responsibility” mean resignation?

All we know is that not a week passes without something going wrong somewhere in the public sector and an almighty row ensuing over “whom to blame”. The reason is that the dinosaur’s head is too far from its foot.

The nearer a school, hospital or police force is to its client the easier it is to identify responsibility and thus allocate blame. In the private sector, blame attaches to whoever makes the mistake. The same applies in properly “tiered” democracies. In most cities abroad, a poorly performing school, a corrupt planning decision or a fiscal scandal is accounted to the elected mayor. If the relevant service is provincial, it is to the governor, if national to the minister. Accountability is clean. The franchise bites at each tier.

In Britain nothing bites but an occasional general election. Nobody down the ladder of public administration accepts blame since performance is dictated by Whitehall. The reason why so many police cars crash is that government offers more money the faster that 999 calls are answered. Hospitals are dirty because ministers want cash diverted to lower waiting times. Yet when these policies go awry, the centre pushes blame back down the line.

Ministers resign only when caught with the wrong woman or the wrong mortgage. As a result, the public’s one recourse is to set the press onto the most high-profile beast, separate it from the herd and hound it to death.

Accountability becomes a random bloodsport. Blair is experiencing it this weekend, while de Menezes’s actual killers, their operational superiors and the home secretary, who claims responsibility for counter-terrorism, all go scot free.

The basis on which Blair is being challenged to resign is not one that British politicians any longer recognise. Although he was not involved in the decisions that led to de Menezes’s death, he was conveniently exposed. The public wanted a scalp. The government, in the shape of the attorney-general as head of the CPS, saw an opportunity for getting one cheap from an Old Bailey jury.

Blair has committed plenty of gaffes, but they have largely been a result of his love for publicity and for playing politics. He appears to have reacted to the de Menezes killing in a detached and initially obstructive way. As a result he continues to lack the confidence that his office needs to be effective. But he should not be sacrificed to a squalid health and safety gambit that can only make the job of counter-terrorism harder.

We have yet to see the outcome of the IPCC inquiry into the affair, to be delivered this week. Blair’s culpability may then be more clearly established. But when certain politicians cry the virtue of chiefs taking the rap for their subordinates’ errors, I ask, since when did they suddenly believe in that?

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