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So, if I give a couple of twenties to the man who spends an afternoon digging, hacking and dragging a stump out of my back garden after a tree fell on the house, Dave Hartnett of HMRC thinks I am “diddling” the nation? Is that what he thinks we small people do in the carrying out of neighbourly acts? Diddle the nation? I want to make clear that I have never knowingly diddled anything or anyone at any time in my life. Diddling sounds far too Benny Hill for me. There are some words that grown-ups should not use in public discourse even when they’re being euphemistic and groping for a word to veil one filthier or more embarrassingly four-letter. Diddling is one such word. I’m pursing my mouth each time I type. Panties is another – a word no woman ever utters (unless she’s a native of the American South). You might hear “panties” used diffidently by older men in Selfridges at Christmas, possibly because “knickers” might sound too real and therefore too blushmaking when spoken aloud to a young woman who is no doubt wearing knickers herself (cough) or – aargh, perish the thought – not wearing them. Don’t you recoil from twee more than anything else? I do. And in the mouth of a man who heads an aggressive, swaggering, savagely punitive and pigheaded government department, the word “diddling” is depressing beyond measure. He won’t be heading HMRC for much longer, though. The anti-diddling Mr Hartnett was given a pretty good rollocking by the Public Accounts Committee last month for HMRC’s avowed mistake in collecting too little tax from Goldman Sachs, plus another £25 billion or so from other large companies. Margaret Hodge, having heard much interesting detail about Dave’s wining and dining with big companies eventually asked him if he’d “considered his position”, which sounds like another euphemism to me. He said he wasn’t going to resign, but he has now put out the welcome (in this house) news that he will “retire” from HMRC in the summer. Before he goes, though, he seems keen to leave a Dave Hartnett Memorial Imprint in HMRC’s tax-collecting arena: a telephone line, whereby I could report my cheery stump-grinder for not issuing me with a VAT receipt and 20 per cent on top of the notes. Dave Hartnett thinks payments in cash have been a problem for a long time. A problem that you and I should worry about, not just tax nabobs and accountants. “The people who are worried about it,” he told this paper yesterday, “should use our whistle-blowing line to tell us.” My first thought about a whistle-blowing line was: Ha! Fat chance! Nobody worries about small cash-in-hand payments and everyone hates sneaks. But then I thought about it and realised that people do sneak when they think they’ll get away with it, if you don’t have to give your name. That horrible new arrangement regarding suspected child abusers is a case in point: any pub gossip about someone being a bit dodgy around children is put on the website under the category MONITORING. It’s never taken off, either. One argument with a neighbour and you’re on it for life. All you need to do is give HMRC the name and telephone number of a plumber you’ve paid in cash and subsequently become dissatisfied with and he’s bang to rights. I’ve had one cleaner in my life whom I paid monthly, by cheque. She ran a small business, employing half a dozen women and sent me invoices showing VAT at the puny rate it was back in the Major years. I was happy to pay because she also charged her clients enough to give employees two weeks’ annual holiday pay. Since most English people I know get six weeks’ holiday pay a year, pitching in for a fortnight for your cleaning woman is the least one can do. The Public Accounts Committee learned that Dave Hartnett had lunch or dinner with the high heid yins of big companies on 107 occasions over three years. He said: “Most of them were sandwiches.” Sandwiches? Another twee euphemism, surely?

Isn't it odd when someone in public life just seems to have no sense of how ridiculous everyone finds them. If I was Dave Hartnett a) I'd probably have resigned already, and b) I wouldn't be so monumentally stupid as to make comments like this after everyone found out I was hopelessly corrupt. Does he think we haven't noticed? Or that we believed his desperate waffle to the PAC? Did he wander out of there straightening his tie and saying, all Alan Partridge-like, "well, I think that went rather well"?

See also under: Tony Blair's secret millions.

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