The Sketch: The truth on those statistics - if you are ready for bad news

By good chance yesterday, I ran into a friend who owns a research company. Clients pay him to investigate the satisfaction levels of their customers.

So his staff go out with clipboards, interview the public, write down what is said, and give the answers to the rewrite man. This fellow, vital to the success of the research company, tarts the ruder remarks up and tones the criticism down. If statements of fact are too brutal, they are changed as well. The clients prefer it like that, my friend explains, so he does, too.

It's an entire dimension of statistics that we aren't aware of. Results of all research have to be discounted by the Courtesy Index. The Reluctance to Offend the Client Index. The Dishonesty Index.

And that's in the private sector. Imagine what public sector research is like. The private sector is paying to get bad news; the public sector pays to get good news. That's why Paul Boateng can produce results in the House that show the Government is doing extraordinarily well in meeting the vast majority of its targets. "The true figures," he said, rejecting Tory accusations, "the true figures are 83 per cent and 97 cent!" Those were the proportion of targets that are being met by the government. Ninety-seven per cent of targets are being met! The fairies at the bottom of my garden are getting drunk and naked by way of celebration. Watch them go!

Ninety-seven per cent. Perhaps that's what Mr Boateng meant by "the technical challenge of data collection". It allowed him to dismiss Tory allegations that 40 per cent of 1998's targets had been missed, as well as 75 per cent of 2001's. "On the face of it, absolute nonsense!" Mr Boateng jeered suavely. Of course there's always more than one face in politics and the other face wears a very different expression.

Five departments including the Home Office are six months late publishing their statistics. Their rewrite man is still working on them.

Matthew Taylor from the Liberal Democrats explained that Mr Boateng's 97 per cent figure of "met" targets included targets that had been "partially met.

"Or, as normal people say, 'Not met'." Oh yes. There was that. But Mr Boateng was unrepentant. In which case we had witnessed a rare failure of presentation. If "partially met" means "met", all targets have been met! Even targets that have not yet been announced! Watch the hems of those fairy dresses swirl and skirl! Third World debt write-offs. Kali Mountford (Won't Somebody Think of the Children!) brought up the matter of Western companies pursuing Third World governments for debts they'd contracted.

One instinctively sides with the underdog in such cases but it's most unlikely that these companies will ever be able to retrieve what is rightfully theirs.

Gordon Brown said that the government that Nestlé had been dealing with had been voted out, therefore the debt should be written off. It was a rotten government anyway. This logic may be used when future graduates ask to have their student loans written off, the government that introduced them having been voted away.

Of course, Lord Brown (as he will be then) will dismiss that type of argument as ridiculous. And quite right too.

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