‘Delivering on” is one of the worst of the ugly new expressions of the new Labour era. However, as with most of Labour politicians’ promises, “delivering on” is something that they don’t actually do. It seems they can’t.

This past week jaws everywhere must have been dropping at the school exams fiasco. Hundreds of thousands of children broke up for the summer holidays on Friday without knowing their Sats results – due on July 8 – because they aren’t ready. Some papers haven’t been marked, some haven’t even been collected and it now seems that many have been lost or wrongly graded by examiners of doubtful quality. All 1.2m papers may have to be remarked. Children, teachers and parents must be beside themselves with disappointment and anger.

Ed Balls, the schools secretary, says he is upset and angry and wants to know why the body responsible for marking hasn’t “delivered on” its obligations. How childish. Perhaps he isn’t aware that, quite apart from his feelings being of no interest to anyone, the buck stops with him. He should really be cross with himself. It’s true that the marking of these Sats has been subcontracted to ETS, a private American organisation, but that doesn’t reduce the government’s responsibility for “delivering on” it – rather the reverse. It, after all, decided to hire ETS, despite accusations that it has mismanaged academic testing abroad.

The Sats fiasco is just one of many eye-stretching recent examples of government incompetence – Northern Rock, the treatment of soldiers, the benefits chaos, Neets [youngsters not in employment, education or training], police bureaucracy, the Olympics, migration, waste, doctors’ employment, pensioners’ poverty, SureStart. We are so used to it by now that we hardly notice. And it seems the prime minister is being forced by his own incompetence to abandon his own golden rules and borrow his way out of trouble. If this is true, said the Conservatives, “it puts the final nail in Gordon Brown’s reputation for economic competence”.

Surely there can be no doubt that not Brown but incompetence reigns. The question is why? I don’t think the problem has to do with individuals, although some ministers are startlingly unimpressive. The problem is one of institutionalised incompetence.

Government, particularly a dirigiste and micromanaging one like ours, is a matter of management. “Delivering on” depends on competent management. Yet, incredibly, almost no one in government has any experience of management at all. None of the present cabinet has experience of managing a large business. The supposedly heavy hitters Brown, Darling, Straw, Smith, Johnson, Hutton and Balls have no management experience at all, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Only one in seven MPs has any management experience either.

The TPA has published a study in which 32 top business executives (of the FTSE 100 companies) were asked to list the essential qualities for a good senior manager. They highlighted three: experience of senior management, five years in the post and experience of the sector in question.

On the first – experience – the government scores abysmally. But things are just as bad on the second. Top politicians flit from ministry to ministry as if they had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

In the 11 years since 1997 there have been seven secretaries of state for education, work and skills; five for what I think of as AgFish, five for health, five for the Home Office, five for trade and industry and eight for social security, work and pensions. It is self-evidently impossible to oversee a large and complex ministry and shepherd through ambitious programmes, or to know the consequences of your own mistakes, if you have barely enough time in the job to settle in your potted plants. Besides, this hypermobility gives undue power to the thoroughly bedded-in Sir Humphreys.

That might not matter if the Sir Humphreys had management experience themselves. But, the Taxpayers’ Alliance paper argues, few permanent secretaries have ever worked outside the civil service. Senior civil servants tend to be inexperienced, too, and more focused on policy than on delivery.

There is a tendency in British culture, which is so intensely verbal, to mistake the word for the act, particularly among politicians who love the sound of their own promises. New Labour ministers believe that announcing something, or reannouncing it, is nearly the same as having done it. In people of little or no practical experience, the hot-air tendency has never been deflated by the harsh pressures of the real world.

There’s another explanation underlying this incompetence. Oddly enough I believe it has to do with meritocracy. In the bad old days, intelligent people without the right education or the right connections, and most women, too, were obliged to go into jobs well beneath their powers. The result was a cohort of very able minor and middle ranking civil servants, teachers and functionaries. Now with meritocracy those bright people (and all those women) can aspire much higher, with the result that the responsible but uninspiring jobs they used to do are done by less able people.

The brightest nannies and nurses of yesterday are the doctors of today and their replacements tend to be less able; so, too, across Whitehall and to some extent across local government as well. The brightest and the best tend not to go into it. The huge rewards of banking, law or private enterprise are much more open now in a more meritocratic society.

Recruitment for the Foreign Office, for example, is much less demanding than it used to be, or so I have been told. Candidates who would have been automatically rejected in the past are now regularly taken on. If admissions have slipped there, it’s likely that they have slipped everywhere in Whitehall. And how could it be otherwise, given the abysmal state of British education, quite apart from the lure of the private sector?

Incompetence has dreadful power, particularly because people and institutions find it so hard to recognise it in themselves. But there is a way to resist it. It is to try to do much less and forget about “delivering on” everything that comes to mind. That simple, rather obvious insight is the real legacy of poor Gordon Brown.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Times Recommends

• How to stop the Queen picking the next PM
• To save the planet, strike a deal with Big Oil
• Bankers think it’s all over. Time to think again