That was how my client today told me he would react if I had telephoned him yesterday and told him that a junior member of the firm had accidentally posted confidential information about my client's business to someone else. "Why don't politicians have the same level of accountability?" he asked.
Good question. My family, together with almost every other British family, has apparently been subject to the most outrageous breach of trust by the Government in the losing of CD Roms containing unencrypted details of every family's names, bank account and national insurance numbers, child benefit numbers and children's names. This is quite simply shocking. As one commentator put it last night, "the security and privacy threat will last for years."
The point that my client was making was that it is not good enough for the Chancellor or the Prime Minister to say that it was not their fault - my client wouldn't care whether it was actually my fault or not he would hold me responsible as the person responsible for the firm's relationship with him. I agree with him; Alistair Darling's position looks increasingly shaky.
More widely for the Government, this is a disaster following just a day after the revelations about Northern Rock. Competence, economic or otherwise, is key to any Government's fortunes and this week has not been reassuring to a public still shaken by the revelation that the Home Office is, "not fit for purpose." Apparently nor is the Treasury.
What the last forty-eight hours have demonstrated absolutely clearly is that the concerns that many people, including me, have voiced about creating a super database of information for the ID card scheme are not just the concerns of conspiracy theorists. It seems to me that tonight Gordon Brown must be acknowledging in private if not publicly that ID cards are now as dead as Planning Gain Supplement, super casinos and all the other policies he has quietly dropped since becoming PM.
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