The Hogwarts school of Tube mathematics

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Like most recipients of e-mails, I sometime download a mass of gibberish. A recent missive ran roughly as follows: "**^TM##35^^^6#+//$^TMTMTMH5! !!..." and so on for 25 pages. I told the sender that he risked a serious virus. That was no virus, he said, it was Gordon Brown's latest plan for the Tube. I was lucky. The full version ran to 2,800 pages. You could paper the Jubilee Line with it and be none the wiser.

The upshot is clear. To understand the Government's new London Tube requires the maths skill of an Einstein and the humour of a Marx brother. To know if a train is late, we must not look at our watch but decipher dx3.78x{1/vSR-1/vL}. Having assessed the Normal Line Speed Parameters adjusted for Payment Periods of Lost Customer Hours, we must know whether our ERT is greater than 120 seconds and whether a designated piece of litter is bigger than five centimetres square. Our Train Ambience is then weighted by the formula, A = Z[QATASj x Wtj/ZjWTj + Zk Wtk], plus more of the same.

If any hapless passenger dares ask a simple question, like who is in charge, he will be referred in sequence to an Attribution Meeting, a Review Meeting, a Level A Meeting, a Level B Meeting, a Contract Managers' Meeting, a PPP Board Meeting, a Senior Representat ive Review, an Adjudicator's Review and a punch-up between Stephen Byers and a judge. After that he can choose between Gandalf, Merlin and the Wizard of Oz. Either way he will still be standing at Oxford Circus station.

This is bureaucratic dementia. It is the climactic of Whitehall contempt for managers and management. Officials who could not be left in charge of a whelk stall pretend to run a railway by numbers. Those who could not survive a day running a Starbucks think they can blind the nation with management science. No wonder Mr Brown is too scared to appear before Gwyneth Dunwoody's transport committee to defend the witch of this brew, his aide, Shriti Vadera.

This is no joke. The descent into farce of Tube privatisation might seem the work of some Voldemort from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The rodents we see scampering along the rails at Chalk Farm might be Government officials bewitched by some accident in the Potions Class. They at least have ministerial broomsticks to get them home.

Those who have no broomstick cannot see the joke. The Evening Standard reported last night that Tube cancellations are now the highest for five years. I quote from a letter sent by the head of Transport for London (but not of its Tube), Bob Kiley, to the man supposedly negotiating with the private companies, the invisible chairman of London Underground, Sir Malcolm Bates. Sir Malcolm answers to Mr Byers and thus to Mr Brown.

The letter protests furiously at the 135 documents filled with impenetrable jargon by which he, Mr Kiley, must run the Tube if the public-private partnership is ever put in place. He savages "this Hydra" with words such as "staggering complexity", "excruciating detail", " systems analysis run amok" and "reckless experiments with mathematical modelling".

The reason for the letter is simple. The Tube infrastructure contracts, now two years overdue, are still being negotiated to take account of the collapse of City confidence in Mr Byers after the Railtrack debacle. Nobody will give him a penny of risk capital after he declared his loathing of railway shareholders and his readiness to sack any regulator who refuses his orders. The three companies bidding for 30-year contracts to operate the Tube are naturally demanding cast-iron guarantees against ever suffering Railtrack's fate.

So desperate is the Treasury to get these contracts off its plate that it is ready to agree to almost anything the companies demand. It is already allowing them to make a profit even if they run a service no better than at present. New concessions will allow them to run a five per cent worse service and still draw a performance bonus. We must note once again that these contracts are being driven by Treasury staff on secondment from City banks in a position to benefit from such comfort clauses.

This is not privatisation but public theft. Any complaints by the new London Underground against the private contractors will be buried in maths, otherwise called "multi-faceted performance regimes". Armies of inspectors will literally measure the width of litter to see under which formulaic heading it is counted for penalty. Contracts which, in simpler form, might make sense between distinct companies are being injected into the veins of one hierarchy, clearly inviting total seizure. The consultants earning millions in fees for this rubbish, Freshfields and PriceWaterhouse, should have to ride the Tube each night in dunces' caps.

The Tube infrastructure companies will be virtually immune from losing their contracts if they fail to perform. Maintenance and safety managers, however incompetent, cannot be removed by the train operators. The companies need promise no new investment beyond the first seven years of their contracts. They need not even publish an investment plan. The Government's promise to guarantee Transport for London's subsidy to cover its rent to the new companies has been dropped. Privatisation was a noble cause. The Treasury's obsession with control has polluted it. The new London Underground will be just another nationalised industry, but one riddled with red tape, its managers impotent to manage and its contractors incentivised only to shortterm gain. Nobody will be responsible, except a Hal-like computer with a formula no one can understand.

Someone has found time to count the number of words in the new contracts. There are two million of them. This pile of steaming ordure dumped on the London travelling public is sheer official sabotage against those who try to do things rather than criticise. In any well-run organisation, two million words of blameshedding, risk-averse, feeinflating, obscurantist, flatulent drivel would be replaced by two crisp words of leadership: "Do it!"