Anomalies in your tax affairs? Could happen to any of us with an offshore bank account - Andy Brown

Admittedly few will have had the chance to do that whilst Chancellor of the Exchequer but anyone in that high office might be careless with money. It is a well known qualification for managing the nation's finances.

Just as that is an important skill for the person who was put in charge of the Conservative Party’s own finances by the current Prime Minister. Before being sacked by the same man. We mustn't be unreasonable in our expectations about the competence of those who lead the country.

And, of course, any one of us could have all too easily made the simple human error of instructing our lawyers to write letters to journalists denying allegations which the government’s top ethics adviser appears to have confirmed. Carelessly.

If such understandable small errors don’t attract your natural sympathy for a fellow mortal then perhaps your heart will go out to another political figure who has made the most honest of mistakes.

It must be a common error that any of us could fall into to apply for a job that requires you to champion political neutrality when you are a major donor to one particular political party.

The BBC can rarely have had the benefit of such independent governance appointed with such a clear eye on impartiality as it gained when its Chairman succeeded in getting the job a few days after pointing the Prime Minister in the right direction to receive an £800,000 loan. We must all have done similar things.

Just as we must all have told people with a straight face that it is possible to have cake and eat it. Or advised the nation that it could increase its prosperity by making it more difficult for our businesses to export to their major markets.

There is too little sympathy for those who tell us that things are easy and a rosy future faces us if we just let politicians experiment with our future.

Poor Liz Truss was genuinely very well meaning when she tried to spend money she didn’t have on a dash for growth. No reasonable person could expect a Prime Minister to be careful about how the economy is managed.

Those who are suffering as their mortgage goes through the roof just at the time when they were worrying over how to pay the gas bill and the food bill ought to have more sympathy for those who do the difficult job of trying to put daft political theories into practice.

Just as all too few of us are giving proper regard to the current Prime Minister’s ability to provide a steady hand on the tiller. It takes skill and judgement to provide the country with stability and get things back on track after a decade of mistakes. Particularly when you belong to the political party that made those mistakes.

We should perhaps try to be more inspired with confidence as the third Prime Minister in less than a year thinks he can create stability by presiding over a wave of strikes from workers who have never chosen to go out on strike before and that the nation was applauding for its dedication to duty so very recently.

Who are midwives and nurses to think that they can advise professional politicians on the realities of everyday life? The nation needs lessons in mathematical skills from those with a better connection with practical matters than those who have to manage a household budget.

Some of those nurses are so very badly out of touch with the real day to day world that they think it is a problem that inflation is running at 10.5 per cent a year but public sector pay rises are running at 3.3 per cent.

They are naïve enough to believe that this leaves them 7.2 per cent worse off and that this is scant reward for putting their lives on the line during a major health pandemic.

We must all be prepared to make allowances for our political leaders as they refuse to talk seriously about compromise with those who think differently to them. Because politics has never been about the art of compromise and it is always good for the country if our leaders stubbornly stick to their beliefs whilst important national services like the NHS and the railways go to the dogs.

After all, anyone can make mistakes. Just not perhaps on quite this scale quite so frequently.

Andy Brown is a Craven District Councillor representing Aire Valley with Lothersdale and the Green Party North Yorkshire Councillor for Aire Valley.