DEFRA: Deny Everything Forlornly Reel Along

What's DEFRA and Adrain Chiles got in common?

Adrain Chiles new book is called "We don't know what we're doing." Amazon

I imagine that working in DEFRA's offices is a bit like that.

Just after it comes to light that the two head honchos have just one farm between them in their constituencies, it has now been revealed that they have wasted more than £26m on failed IT projects in the past five years, according to the Farmers' Weekly.

More than £12m of it was blown on an abandoned program to produce a database of all the department's electronic information, while an initiative to manage licences for protected animals was scrapped after £4m was spent.

That might sound like a lot to you and me, but it's still relatively small beer to this inept bunch of clipboard-wielding nancy boys. They also still face EU fines of about £300m for the mistakes made by their Rural Payments Agency in January this year.

Makes the £350,000 on taxis story pale into insignificance now doesn't it?