The Prime Minister…this shot says it all.

Gordon Brown’s learning difficulties are apparent in every aspect of the universal personalised website.

There are many topics about which one feels a sinking sensation the second that urgent fingers are tapping at the keyboard. One of them is numbers: as a nation, we are petrified of maths, and thus happy for an autistic PM to keep spouting them so we don’t have to. This has allowed him to cheat Chilcot and fudge the issue on fiscal numbers in the last month alone. Another subject is threats to our liberty. No matter how many times one records yet another rip in Magna Carta or a further keystone of habeus corpus quietly removed, the effect is almost zero. The Tory Party’s reward to David Davies for taking a stand on the issue was to relegate him to the back benches. No doubt Cameron thought this a smart move; it was actually a profoundly stupid move – and one that demonstrates how the Opposition leader (while probably a very nice man) knows little of any importance about anything.

I’m going through the motions this time on the issue of Everyone’s Personal Website because (a) my headstone really is going to say ‘At least I tried’ and (b) the idea is idiotic in ways that have nothing to do with libertarianism. So anyway, here we go again.

I know it’s become a cliche, but the most prescient book of the 20th century was without question 1984 – written in 1948. From a distance of sixty years, the author George Orwell may have got the socio-economic backcloth wrong, but his reading of human nature was spot-on. Almost everything he predicted has either happened or is happening.

Living in a largely radio age, Orwell expected there to be microphones everywhere. Instead, we have CCTV cameras, but the East German Stasi kept the microphone sector going single-handed for more than forty years. Living in the pre-pc era, Orwell imagined large two-way TV screens in every home. But you would struggle to get a tissue paper between that concept and the idea of a personal website for everyone. For that too – by definition – is a two-way street.

By the end of 2012, it will be law in France for every new car to be fitted with two-way Satnav. The Government there is quite open about the fact that they intend to use it for spotting when drivers are exceeding the speed limit. The EU is just gagging to expand this idea to every member-State. I bet you can’t imagine why.

Another development passing most folks by is the variation between what the Government says it is doing about surveillance, and what is actually happening. Denials are there many, but the revelation that our own money has been used to pay the ISPs for the installation of software to monitor us is a doozy. A personalised website for everyone (and just wait – it won’t be optional) is the final link in the chains that will bind us. A little webcam popped on the top of the pc (£11.99 from Comet) and Bob’s yer uncle: Big Brother is Watching You.

Every line of thought the bright things have had about this ‘drive’ to save billions – oh look, there’s another number plucked out of the air – shows that while the controlling Executive power in this country may want to watch everything, it learns nothing. Remember Connecting for Health? The one that Brown said cost £11 billion, but only after he’d lost the other £10 billion on other bits of Treasury paper? That was going to be a new dawn as well. Remember ‘a computer on every desk in our schools’? Another flash idea from Tony Blair that was strangled before birth by the prudent Chancellor.

And as for ‘the dash to a paperless society’ – I give up. The cashless monetary system was coming in 1974, and we’re still waiting. The paperless office was coming in 1985, but then they invented the printer that needs eight goes to print anything. And of course the world is so wireless, we can’t walk anywhere without tripping over a snake-pit of wires. It’s going to mean thousands of bureaucrats get the chop? I’m not holding my breath.

But let’s say they do take the human element out of the whole experience. That’d be a good idea, wouldn’t it? Then we can do with all forms of government what we have to do already with every form of online service – go down into the labyrinthine chat-rooms and user forums!

This election gimmick sorry idea has Gordon Brown running through it like a DNA structure: no human contact with the electorate, no lessons learned, no lack of mad hubris, no foresight, and – the only reassuring thing for the time being – no possibility whatsoever of being able to afford it.

There are few silver linings to be seen in the cloud that is national bankruptcy, but that’s one of them.