He had managed to track down the amount of spending the Chancellor has moved

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He had managed to track down the amount of spending the Chancellor has moved off balance sheet.There are contingent liabilities in the accounts at about Â£44bn. Is that a lot or a little? I think we can safely say it's a lot You could take 15p off income tax with Â£44bn. The Chancellor has underwritten various public projects that private firms have contracted to undertake. By listing them as contingent liabilities he gets schools, hospitals and a new London Underground system but doesn't have to admit to having increased public spending.Thus, when the Prime Minister jeers at Iain Duncan Smith, asking how public services can be improved without raising taxes, he's been quite lucky not to have had this thrown back in his face.In the committee, Mr Brown defended himself by saying that moving items off balance sheet was a practice commonly used by the private sector.Mr Tyrie stirred himself (he has the idlest manner in the House) to observe that this was hardly much of a recommendation.

Enron moved items off balance sheet and collapsed in a smoking pile of ruins as a result.It was a brief encounter in an obscure committee room, but it's rare for Gordon Brown to have points scored off him. Everyone should be grateful to Mr Tyrie as a result.The Tories – or more accurately, the Conservatives – have no sense about them of a keen and hungry opposition confident of their place in the world, a party ready to slaughter. No, they have a lie-low policy, waiting for things to go bad for the government Their moment is coming, they feel.Perhaps it is coming At this rate, it will always be. How to make things worse -Â pass new lawsWe anarcho-rainbow types enjoy the idea of unintended consequences because they subvert the certainties of central planners, pan-national regulators, bulk legislators and all the other crypto-authoritarians who insist they know what they're doing.When the Government passed laws to give tenants more security, landlords stopped renting out properties. Fewer flats became available and those that were available were more expensive. Legislating to make things better for tenants made things worse for tenants.There is a bed crisis in hospitals Beds are blocked by old patients who have nowhere to go.

Why? Some 46,000 beds have been lost in the care home industry. Why? The government regulated for higher and more expensive standards in care homes, marginal homes closed down.So, pensioners lie on hospital trolleys for days because the government has legislated to improve things for pensioners.We heard last week that the number of beds blocked had recently reduced a bit from 6,000. This was because Â£300m of public money had been applied to the problem.When you do the maths that turns out to cost Â£50,000 per bed.Wouldn't it have been cheaper to give the money to the care homes to make the improvements in the first place? My undercover attempt to hold court with the DukeThere was an embarrassing leak last week; word got out that the Queen had asked me down to Windsor for a t?-??. The person responsible has been disciplined.In the event, 700 others turned up. Some were grandees from the big circulation Sundays, others had come from Basildon.

We all shared equally our subject status.I wanted to talk to the Duke of Edinburgh. Yes, I wanted to reassure him that his recent remarks about Aborigines spearing each other – far from being a reactionary gaffe – were in the forefront of indigenous peoples' rights theory. If an indigenous Australian is arrested, he or she may choose not to go through the normal court process, but instead be tried by their tribal elders. If found guilty of a serious offence they may be speared, painfully, in the leg.Alas, I didn't manage to get the story out.