It has been one damned thing after another through half a century of British governance  from Blue Streak to the poll tax to anything to do with computers at Defence, Health or Duncan Smithy, a tragedy of billions wasted, egg on faces, and Joe Taxpayer picking up the tab.

It should be a deeply distressing account of blunders past, present and pending from two of our most brilliant political analysts, but in fact you have to smile gallantly through many of the disasters that throng 400 or more of these pages. Who on earth thought that Whitehall's Oxbridge mandarins  classicists, generalists  could prove fit for digital purpose? Who dreamed that a bewildering succession of under-briefed, under-talented ministers could take charge of the NHS? If ding-dong politics means scrapping the projects an outgoing government left behind, why on earth be surprised that the list of dongs dwarfs any dings? Do bucks ever stop anywhere these days?

In a sense, the main virtue of this thoroughly entertaining and erudite history of great British debacles is a simple list system: we forget how so many bold promises have come crashing down, and it's vitally instructive to remember them and to try to discover the why of the horror as well as the what (reaching parts that the National Audit Office doesn't pretend to reach). You can't say King and Crewe achieve perfect explanations here  or provide enough far-flung panaceas beyond Scandinavian "deliberation" over policy outcomes, as opposed to London-based lurches, posturing and endemic problems. All democratic countries  the USA, France, Italy, even Germany  have their fiascos. Are we alone in our ingrained, dislocated, arrogant, unapologetic incompetence? The nasty surprise lurking here couldn't be more discommoding: perhaps we are.

This book will make you gasp in disbelief and stamp your feet in rage, and quite frequently reduce you to helpless laughter. It will also make you tremble in terror at the realisation that the people in charge of our destinies are, in many respects, idiots. With clarity, elegance and wit, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe recall the most egregious blunders committed by British governments over the last three decades. Some of them are widely remembered, such as the poll tax, the Millennium Dome and membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, others almost forgotten, such as individual learning accounts and the Assets Recovery Agency. A few, such as Labour's comically bungled distribution of European Union subsidies to British farmers under a new "single payment" scheme, were scarcely noticed even at the time. In all these instances, ministers failed wholly to achieve the outcome they intended; sometimes they achieved the opposite. They also, in several cases, wasted billions of pounds of public money and did great damage, sometimes lethal damage, to the people they were supposedly trying to help.

The causes of the blunders were numerous. In many cases, ministers and their senior officials were simply ignorant  King and Crewe politely call it "cultural disconnect"  of how large sections of the population lived from day to day. The Tories had no inkling that, if sent a poll tax bill of several hundred pounds, some families, and particularly elderly couples, would not be able to pay. "Well, they could always sell a picture," suggested Nicholas Ridley, the then environment secretary and the son of a viscount, apparently in all seriousness.

But Labour has become almost equally disconnected from real life, with its frontbenchers and advisers increasingly drawn from a cohort that went from school to university (usually Oxbridge) to Westminster thinktank without ever working in a retail store, a hamburger joint or a benefit office. Its tax credits scheme involved paying out weekly or monthly a sum that was determined annually.

Millions of people short of money, many of whom had never previously completed a tax return, had to fill out complex forms about their previous year's earnings, estimate earnings for the following year and notify the authorities each time their circumstances changed. The scheme, as the head of the Inland Revenue admitted, went "spectacularly wrong". About 2 million eligible people failed to apply; about 300,000 who did apply didn't receive payments in time; and, at the end of the first year, nearly 2 million were found to have been overpaid. The scheme's architects didn't grasp that millions of people managed their finances week to week, even day to day, their employment being spasmodic and their earnings unpredictable.

Labour's individual learning accounts fiasco  still used in some business schools as a case study in failure  got little coverage because, as with the proverbial small earthquake in Chile, there weren't many dead. The biggest victim was the taxpayer. The scheme, giving poorly qualified people modest sums to help "buy" training courses to improve their skills, was pure New Labourism. The courses would be offered not by established further education colleges, regarded as conservative and unimaginative pillars of the dreaded "education establishment", but by a plethora of "new providers".

Potential trainees would choose options from a dynamic and innovative market. Unfortunately, ministers and civil servants failed to devise any checks that "providers" were actually putting on courses, or that "trainees" were taking them, or that the courses indeed existed. The scheme was wide open to fraud.

Many learning accounts were criminal inventions. In one instance, 6,000 were created for a single address, and in another the names of account holders turned out to be Hindi swearwords. When the scheme was wound up, fraudsters had pocketed at least £97m out of £290m spent.

Just as Tory ministers, when establishing personal pensions a decade earlier, couldn't imagine that banks and insurance companies would be so wicked as to missell them, or consumers be so foolish as to buy "products" that made them worse off, so Labour ministers couldn't see that an unregulated market in training would throw up so many charlatans. In the age of neoliberalism, the borderline criminality of much private enterprise and the credulity of many asymmetrically informed consumers were just not part of their worldview.

King and Crewe reckon that Labour and Tory governments are equally prone to cockups. In a postscript, they judge the coalition, with its start-stop-start NHS reforms, its misallocated franchise award for the West Coast mainline, its aborted plan to sell off forests, its malfunctioning disability assessments, and so on, to be "if anything  even more blunder-prone than its predecessors". And they note that private-sector companies also blunder: think of the banks in the runup to the 2008 crisis or BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We mock governments for their IT disasters, to which King and Crewe devote a chapter, but similar fiascos have bankrupted private companies.

To err is human but to really foul up, as an American journalist added to Pope's famous line, you need computers. Yet many of the blunders King and Crewe recall can be partly attributed to how the British run their government and politics. Britain is said to benefit from decisive government, without the gridlock that the separation of powers frequently imposes on American presidents. The trouble is that it's as easy to take bad decisions as to take good ones. Parliament has no significant role in framing legislation and no proper system of pre-legislative scrutiny (public bill committees being charades in which MPs mostly catch up on replying to constituents' letters) such as exists in many other parliamentary democracies, including Scotland. Ministers, advisers and top civil servants rarely involve the people who will have to implement (or, in the fashionable jargon, "deliver") their policies or those who have relevant experience of implementation.

For example, the architects of the Child Support Agency, which failed abysmally to extract maintenance payments from absent fathers  partly because ministers, again ignorant of real life, didn't anticipate how many single mothers would be reluctant to identify the fathers  seem not to have thought of consulting something called "the liable relatives unit", which in a corner of Whitehall had been grappling with the problem for years.

Governments, as King and Crewe say, hoard power and ignore well-informed critics, whom they treat as either political enemies or defenders of "producer interests".

Moreover, there are no penalties for messing up. None of those responsible for the blunders in this book resigned or were sacked, unless you count Norman Lamont, who left the Treasury nine months after the ERM debacle but was less culpable than John Major, who sacked him. Only those charged with putting the impossible into effect risked losing their jobs.

The doctrine of ministerial accountability, King and Crewe argue, is a myth. Ministers resign over scandals and gaffes, rarely over policy failure. At worst, they will be moved, but often to a more senior position.

It is hard to overpraise this book, which lays bare the weaknesses of British government so clinically and entertainingly. The authors have a wonderful eye for the ridiculous: how the Child Support Agency spent two years chasing a childless gay man over a nonexistent daughter; how Lord Falconer, after inheriting the Dome project, announced free entry for 1 million schoolchildren, thus instantly undercutting the project's business plan, which was to sell tickets to families; how contracts for the ill-fated public-private partnership to rebuild London's underground specified the time drivers needed to visit the lavatory. But, given the adversarial nature of British politics, they struggle to propose plausible solutions. They call, surely more in hope than expectation, for a more bipartisan approach to legislation, but are otherwise reduced to proposing prizes of £50,000 for ministers whose policies turn out well.

Though this book provides a comprehensive guide for ministers who wish to avoid blunders, I fear we shall see many more. As the authors point out, ministers now wish to be seen as men and women of decisive action, sweeping aside doubters and cowards, and in this they are encouraged by the 24-hour media, always demanding that something be done, impatient of delay and eager to portray as ditherers those who think carefully and consult widely before they act.

Government has become so media-conscious that it is run, in many respects, rather like a daily newspaper newsroom. And we all know  do we not?  how much error and cutting of corners is found in newspapers.