Sir Max Hastings, grand pooh-bah of the nimby party, officially the Campaign to Protect Rural England, warns from his country estate that the government is callously to concrete rural England.

This is a fantasy propagated by people who are sitting pretty and are damned if they want hoi polloi moving in next door. Country Life magazine and the like ask us to believe the pristine English countryside is incapable of housing any more people.

Instead, they argue that anyone else requiring housing should be forced to live in nasty high-density developments built on disused gasworks.

Without building a single entirely new structure, there are enough empty barns, pigsties and chicken sheds in this parish alone to luxuriously accommodate scores of urban immigrants. But frankly there are plenty of odd and currently useless green fields where a house or two would not be amiss, either.

In fact, the country is desperate for people. We are dying out here. The school has closed. Businesses struggle. We can’t even persuade the asylum seekers to come.

Not that I am without my own ulterior motives. I could use some immigrants at my farm. A few strapping Romanians would be most useful, provided they can muck out a stable and heave a few bales of straw. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, we have very few immigrants in our village, other than people like me, seeking asylum from north London, and Sue down the lane, among the huddled masses exiled from Greenwich, Connecticut.

I should be cheered by the news that the prime minister is stepping in to take personal charge of the immigration crisis. Realistically, however, Downing Street’s dramatic intervention is unlikely to have any near-term impact on the shortage of labour here on the Surrey-West Sussex border.

I am not happy to announce that yet another of my blood-curdling predictions is coming to pass, as it is confirmed that the idiot ministers and civil servants at the department of rural death (Defra) are now presiding over yet another fiasco.

This one is hardly of the scope of the foot and mouth catastrophe but it is an illustrative cameo of our government at work and a chilling warning even for those who may not own horses.

Defra is a department riddled with a form of malignant administrative cancer. It is a dumping ground for the thickest civil servants and the crassest ministers. It is a toss-up which one is the biggest embarrassment. Could it be Margaret Beckett, the secretary of state, whose sole achievement since new Labour came to power has been to fix her teeth? Or the squirt Ben Bradshaw, who I would not trust to run a whelk stall? My own nomination is Alun Michael, so-called minister for the horse.

Michael has decreed that as of June, every horse in Britain must have a passport.

After more than a year to prepare, missed deadlines and utter confusion, fewer than a third of British horses have their passports. When I penetrate the government switchboard to reach the Defra press office, whose telephone number is ex-directory, I find a chirpy Australian press officer who tells me it is going “very well”.

Let us examine the substance of this claim.

Defra has subcontracted the issuance of the passports to several dozen “passport issuing organisations” — including all of the major equestrian bodies — and appears to let them charge whatever they like and make up the rules as they go along.

Needless to say, these organisations, which lack the experience and training and typically are run by well-meaning twits, have not got a clue.

I have a friend who sent off to the British Horse Society in January for her horse’s passport. Three months later, she still has no passport, the British Horse Society has all her original documents and the only apparent progress on the case is that her cheque has been cashed.

Why should those of you not of the equestrian class give a hoot? Consider this. The government that has made a complete bollocks of introducing passports for an estimated 600,000 British horses is about to embark on a much grander project to introduce identity cards for 60m humans.

So here is a prediction: the identity card scheme is going to be the biggest administrative boondoggle in British history.