Another Brown Monday

Here we have the bad news buried away in 26 ministerial statements:

1. The tax take has plummeted by £32 billion;

2. A faulty IT system handling the army payroll had resulted in £140 million of net errors;

3. The MoD had been unable to account for £155 million worth of secure radio sets issued to troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq;

4. The Treasury has failed to stem fraud and error in the tax credit system, which rose from 7.8 to 8.6 per cent last year;

5. The Treasury accounts revealed that it had spent £24 billion bailing out the banks last autumn without getting parliamentary approval first;

6. The National Audit Office says that Train to Gain needs to be better managed, does not provide value for money, and sets unrealistic initial targets;

7. A review of the impact of housing development on gardens has been delayed "because of the larger than expected volume of responses". Ministers will not say whether the evidence suggests that there is a threat from developers to garden land; and

8. Reforms to family legal aid are being postponed. The £528 million annual bill has increased by 25 per cent in real terms but the number of people represented has dropped by 11 per cent.

And with this fine mess, the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury wishes you and your family a happy summer holiday.

You would have thought that Brown would have been a little more grateful to Flintoff than he was earlier.