Dealing with British Telecom has left me in a bad mood - Bernard Ingham

The second is the Government. And the third is the disgraceful behaviour of the trade union movement which is all too indicative of the selfish society we have become. Entitlement has replaced responsibility.

First, BT, which is no place to go if you are gone 90, technologically incompetent and short tempered. Well over a month ago my son began trying to transfer my BT/Sky Sports account to my new living accommodation so that I could watch soccer, rugby and cricket. Sadly, I have not seen so much as a football, let alone a match.

In the process I have had visits by “multi-skilled” BT engineers to my new home without success. It now turns out that a vital “box” was unilaterally cancelled by BT from my equipment order. It is now promised for this week. So much for its multi-skilled engineers.

To cap it all I then had a call at the weekend from a woman in BT about my complaint. I told her she had better speak to my son who had lodged it.

She asked him if he wanted to withdraw it. Not on your life, he said, taking here through the catalogue of incompetence. And for good measure he added that a BT subsidiary had sold his family a new wifi deal with an assurance that they would be able to retain their long existing landline.

Yes, you have guessed it. He can no longer use his existing landline number which will entail his informing vast numbers of people his new one. She had the grace to say she understood why he did not wish to withdraw his complaint.

All this is bad enough, but it compounds previous experience of BT at my old home. I was constantly losing broadband and had three visits by engineers to end the interference. It was only on the third that it dawned on the latest visitor that I was lacking – yes, again – two “boxes” which he promptly collected from his van and solved the problem.

If this is not a clear demonstration that BT is abysmally run, I do not know what is. We are paying through the nose – as with many other rapacious companies – for a hopelessly inferior service, however much they brazenly claim to value our custom.

Continuing a bad week, my son took me for a check up to hospital, allowing two hours for at worst a 45-minute journey.

After dropping me off at the hospital to await his return from parking the car, the nearest space he could find was in a street half a mile away. Cost: £7.50. We were only just in time for the appointment.

The Government then duly converted it into a week to forget, partly with its budget but also with a palsied reaction to the Quality Assurance Agency.

This quango virtually told educational institutions to go woke by, among other things, “decolonising” maths and science.

Here was an opportunity to come down hard on the pathetic nonsense afflicting higher education by killing the quango stone dead. It is clearly not in the business of quality assurance.

As for the budget, I simply do not understand its logic or its politics.

Thanks to the pandemic and Vladimir Putin we are strapped for cash and hammered by inflation. It would have been irresponsible not to slash the budget deficit and debt and thereby give the Tories at least a chance of winning the next election by showing that prudence is not dead.

But I have no more idea than I had from Liz Truss when the Government aims to get the economy back in balance and the list of deferred tax imposts suggests they don’t either. As for slashing expenditure.

Jeremy Hunt threw billions more at the failing NHS without giving us a clue how this and other expensively inefficient public services are to be made to work for the taxpayer. Appointing Patricia Hewitt, Labour former Health Secretary, to improve the NHS strikes me as naïve.

After all, the Labour movement is doing its level best to oust the Tories from office with a massive Christmas strike programme. Yet public sector workers are better protected than most from recession. They are behaving disgracefully and undemocratically. It is a dire warning to us against electing a Labour Government next time.

If you are not livid by now, you ought to be.