The Sketch: The dizzy brunette meets her match in the Queen of the Nile

The waste is fantastic, the management pathetic, the outcome depressing, the mess impenetrable. It's a characteristic tale of government in action.

The NHS, the Dome, pensions, asylum-seekers, and now this other thing, Wembley. Have you heard of Wembley? A football venue in north London? They want to do it up, or knock it down, or maybe both.

"This is the biggest scandal of waste and mismanagement we've ever had in the arts world," Gerald Kaufman said in the committee corridor to the sketch writers. Bigger than the Royal Opera House? "At the end of the Royal Opera House scandal we had an opera house!" he said. We'd only his word for that, but I was inclined to believe him, I don't know why. He looks like the mummified remains of Queen Nefertiti. But in a good way.

Tessa Jowell, the government's token dizzy brunette, had been summoned. We all turned up. We wanted to watch the Mummy curse her (people can be so cruel).

I couldn't make head or tail of it. It's impossible to understand. Here's a shorthand note from the meeting on the same subject earlier in the week. Some financial wretch was explaining why they'd paid so much public money for the stadium. "The £103m was composed of £60m for the land and £40m for the buildings, which were to be pulled down, so not being assets they're being written off. So we had to ensure what we were buying justified the price and that was the basis of our valuation."

The Queen of the Nile said the money had been "flung" at the project before planning permission had even been applied for. The public money had come through a quango called Sport England which didn't present itself at meetings to monitor what was happening.

Tessa fragrantly said: "I think we ought to be more rigorous in lottery grants that carry risks." That sounds fair, surely? It's easy to criticise.

Frank Doran said the value of the land for which they paid £103m was worth no more than £30m. That was ungracious. Tessa was doing the best she could.

There's a 65,000-seater stadium in Germany that's been built for £155m, he revealed. "We've bought the land, we haven't even cleared it and we've almost spent as much as that! Why can't we do these things!"

"You say 'we'," Tessa pointed out. "It's the Football Association that's responsible."

And where the FA wasn't responsible, Wembley National Stadium Ltd was responsible, and where WNSL wasn't responsible, Sport England was responsible. So when was Tessa Jowell responsible? No, you haven't got the hang of this yet. Ministers aren't responsible. They're only responsible when things go right. I repeat: ministers are never responsible.

A member of the committee likened the minister to that genetically-altered chicken they've developed in Tel Aviv, the one that grows entirely without feathers. Yes, people can really be quite unkind.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com