Bernard Ingham: In my humble opinion, this brazen breed of politicians must regain their humility

In fact, Cameron's generally untaxing encounter with the TV gardener has inspired this column. I refer to the audience's applause when the Tory leader said he was not surprised his party was not doing all that well in the opinion polls.

After all – and I paraphrase – politicians were not exactly the flavour of the month or year. The public were pretty fed up with all of them and they had a lot to do to get back on side.

I am not sure this is a rational explanation for the curious state of the opinion polls, but it was an impressive and obviously appreciated admission.

Humility is not something we have come to expect from our public

servants, whether politicians or unelected officials. Indeed, if I had the energy to write a book on what's gone wrong with this great country of ours, I would entitle it: "Where did I put my humility?"

In a few short years – certainly not much more than a decade –government, in its widest sense, has become arrogant, dictatorial, oppressive and downright brazen. Not to put a fine point on it, it

treats we who fund it like dirt. Just a few examples.

How could Gordon Brown fly to Afghanistan the day after telling the Chilcot Inquiry, in the face of rank disbelief from the military, that the Armed Forces had got all the money they asked for to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan?

As if that was not brass-necked enough, he announced 200 new vehicles to replacethe lethal Snatch Land Rovers, even though he had already promised 400.

What does he take us for? Gullible idiots?

Then take the three Labour MPs up before the beak on expenses fraud charges who tried to avoid standing in the dock like ordinary

defendants because, they argued, they were different. In effect, they claimed, they were above the ordinary law and entitled to be tried by their peers in the Commons. What presumption. What contempt.

But the record of the past year is littered with politicians of all parties treating the taxpayer as a milch cow for anything from scotch eggs to duck refuges, through loads of manure to mole eradication – not to mention exploitation of the property market.

And all the time they squabble among themselves, as if the Palace of Westminster were a school playground, over the tax status of party donors when "non-dom" coffer stuffers and other dubious benefactors seem rather thick on the ground. Do they think we can't read?

As if this were not enough, we now learn that university vice

chancellors are coining it, even though higher education is supposedly in a funding crisis. This will inevitably lead to students being saddled with even more fee debt before they have earned a sou.

As for local government and the public services, their sheer consistent failure to protect vulnerable children – or, in the case of the police, vulnerable adults – from parental or yob abuse suggests not just incompetence but a failure of will or conscience.

It is frankly difficult to believe that there is a trace element of public service left in local government, given the fierce determination to wreck weekly rubbish bin collections on the altar of mostly uneconomic recycling.

Yet councillors (above parish status) reward themselves handsomely with allowances running to thousands of pounds for merely turning up while paying some council chief executives more than the Prime Minister to provide steadily worsening services.

You can be sure that if concern for patients rather than bureaucratic demands ruled the NHS, we would seldom hear of superbugs, malnutrition or the vulnerable being left wallowing on stretchers or treated in mop cupboards.

We have seriously to ask ourselves whose side the police and judges are on in the light of their propensity for prosecuting the victims of yobbery and their derisory sentences on those guilty of taking lives.

Where, indeed, did they put their humility? We can only conclude that

it has nearly died of disdain under the essentially arrogant amorality of New Labour governance where the end increasingly seems to justify

the means.

For his realistic assessment of the state of British politics on Titchmarsh alone, Cameron deserves a landslide victory. At least he is humble enough to recognise the problem. That uniquely qualifies him to tackle it.