We are in 1987. The prime minister has just won an election with a reduced majority and is celebrating by handbagging the European Union. As problems at home well up, she diverts attention by striding the world stage. Immediately after polling day, the government promised to listen to people more carefully, but it has lost no time in trundling out a piece of misconceived legislation that will bring it to the brink of catastrophe. The prime minister will not survive to the end of the parliament and neither will the new law.

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher occupied Downing Street and her ill-fated bill enacted the poll tax. Today Tony Blair presses on with identity cards. I have seen this movie before and I know how it ends.

The poll tax fiasco began when Scotland updated the valuation of homes under the old rates system.

It caused a problem because the middle classes would have to pay more. A little petty cash could have solved the difficulty. Instead, it spawned an idiotic idea that brought down Britain’s greatest post-war premier. I am not often prescient but that was one disaster I foresaw.

When Michael Forsyth, then a young Scottish Tory MP, told me that England must introduce the poll tax because the government had already decided to impose it on Scotland,

I told him that his argument was illogical and dangerous.

At first many thought we were on to a winning policy. Abolishing the rates was as popular then as deporting failed asylum seekers is now. But soon we faced riots on the streets and, more seriously for Thatcher, panic among our MPs. By then I had assumed ministerial responsibility for the poll tax. Holding office may have rendered me dishonest but it did not make me stupid. I could see that the law was doomed.

Last week Charles Clarke, the home secretary, reintroduced the identity card bill. In the few months since he last brought it to the Commons, it is striking how much closer to doom his scheme has already moved. Then he argued that the cards were needed to fight terrorism. Not now. That reasoning has been ditched. You cannot play the terror card and simultaneously promise the scheme will be voluntary and take a decade to roll out.

His reassuring estimate of what the scheme will cost has been demolished by two independent reports that put the number three times higher at between £10 billion and £19 billion. Blair and Clarke try to discredit those figures but the public would rather believe Pinocchio than any minister of the crown.

What’s more, the bill now faces parliamentary opposition. When it was last debated the Conservatives, with Michael Howard in the ascendant, backed the government. The party that claimed to stand for the bigger citizen and the smaller state made an ass of itself.

Last week, with David Davis at the helm and Howard absent, the Tories tore into the government, demolishing every one of its flimsy arguments. Ministers won the vote in the Commons but lost the argument. Their majority understates the degree of discontent on all sides. Labour backbenchers savaged the bill and its authors. The Lords will maul it further.

The identity card bill is fatally damaged. A wise government would turn around now and head for port. In a matter of weeks the whole debacle could be quietly forgotten.

But third-term prime ministers are not wise. They are too busy with their global agenda to study the detail of what their ministers have devised. A flood of testosterone dulls the messages from their political antennae. Machismo distorts their sense of proportion.

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