“Answer me this,” said a Kiwi chum of mine last week, “if Max Clifford is so good at PR, how come everyone thinks he’s a c**t?”

It was a question of such Latin profundity that it set my mind running in various different directions. Max Clifford, I thought, is like a banker who keeps on losing everyone’s money. He’s like a Party leader who’s up against New Labour and only gets a draw. Or a £90,000 a week footballer who can’t score goals.

And that’s when it hit me, you see. Not about Max Clifford, but ‘professionals’ in general: they tend to be incompetent.

When we bought our barn here, the solicitor missed a planning permission on another, derelict barn directly in our view. It is now a rather unpleasant house. I’ve never employed an architect capable of measuring distances accurately: on Day Two of the project, the builder (he of the one O-level) tells you the plans are wrong. He’s always right.

Policemen can’t catch villains and accountants can’t add up. Letting agents can’t cope with the simplest leaky tap. Estate Agents get your house value wrong. Not a single contestant on X-Factor can sing, and I’ve rarely met an art director who can draw. I even met a gay while on holiday last year who was hopeless with colours.

Why is it that wannabe professionals are so amateur these days? Last year, negligence cases against doctors cost the NHS £4.4 billion. Andrew Lansley is a former GP who clearly has no idea at all what to do about the NHS, and he’s the bloody Minister of Health. What is going on here?

I wish I had a Pound for every time I’ve asked a lawyer about an outcome, and been told, “Hard to tell, really”. Hard to tell? I know that chum, that’s why I’m asking you.

Did you ever meet a psychiatrist who’d cured someone? No, me neither.

It can’t go on like this, because one day the plonker contagion will spread to something important, like landing an aeroplane or bomb disposal. We need to get to the root of this problem and sort it, otherwise we’ll wake up soon and there’ll be no food because the farmers can’t milk cows, or they planted the maize upside down. And their sheepdogs can’t round up sheep.

I suspect it all started with Gordon Brown. Most things got worse once Brown was given some power: the Treasury emptied, the gold was given away, the Labour Party fell apart, and we had the worst floods for sixty years. We should take the date – 1997 – and call it ‘AG’. In that year, we gained a Chancellor who didn’t understand anything about markets, banking, business or people. It’s AG 14 now, and everyone with a qualification is behaving in the same way. It’s a kind of foot-in-mouth disease.

The Governor of the Bank of England gets every fiscal number wrong, the weather guys get every cyclone wrong,  and the economists get every growth figure wrong. Even the TV news pundits make risible predictions . “It’s right down to the wire here” said the BBCNews Channel’s man – just 12 hours before England lost the World Cup bid by 22 votes to 2.

The answer, of course, is to institute a system of payment by results (PBR). Just as ambulance chasing lawyers say ‘no award, no fee’ (even though they don’t mean it) I feel it would be hugely mind-concentrating if everyone in a position of professional responsibility was, you know – rewarded like salespeople at the sharp end: a basic salary that a north Korean mouse would struggle to live on, with bonuses for every time they got a result.

There’d be just the one caveat: if you kop out and sit on the fence (or the bench), we shoot you.

Think of the immediate and transforming effect this would have on the British way of  life. No more lawyers, Whitehall mandarins, gung-ho surgeons, policemen lying in wait with their speed-guns, Robert Pestons, David Camerons or Wayne Rooneys.

You’d still have Max Clifford at the end of the day, because ironically Clifford does tend to get results for his clients: with him, it’s more a case of ‘physician heal thyself’. But that’s only one c**t where there used to be millions, and the world is about to get very hard-edged indeed – as you can read elsewhere at The Slog. You mark my words: compulsory PBR for all professional advisers is an idea whose hour has come.