Standing at a bus stop in Britain people often try to take comfort from the maxim that you wait for one bus and three come along at once. This isn't strictly speaking true, usually you are lucky if you get two. However, trouble has come in threes for Tony Blair and his government over the last week:

John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, is under pressure to resign following revelations that he had an affair with a civil servant.
The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, is also under pressure to resign over the release, without deportation hearings, of over 1000 foreign prisoners.
Performance by the public sector has come under the microscope following revelations that an important election pledge on the size of infant classes has not been met and in fact the number of infants in classes over has soared by over 25 percent.

All of this a week before the country goes to the polls in the latest round of local elections.

The weekend has seen John Prescott and his erstwhile mistress playing tit-for-tat through the medium of the weekend newspapers. Tracey Temple, Prescott's former diary secretary, revealed lurid details of various sexual encounters between the pair to the Mail on Sunday in exchange for an estimated £100,000. Meanwhile Prescott, while admitting 'intimate relations' appealed to the press to leave him and his wife alone to try and rebuild their marriage.

There can be no doubt that Prescott is by no means the first boss to have an affair with a subordinate and certainly he won't be the last however one of the occupational hazards of politics is that the private very often becomes public. It is wrong of people to expect politicians to be anything other than human but it is also wrong of politicians to preach standards to the public and then not abide by them themselves.

Ultimately this is why this affair will probably be less damaging than those that dogged the Conservative Party in the twilight of its government; John Major's ailing government was running a 'Back to Basics' morality campaign at the time and the hypocrisy was obvious for all to see. Comparisons with that period also fail to take account of the fact that one of the primary blunders of that administration was economic - thus people were hit where it really hurt, in their wallets.

Having said that, ministerial incompetence on the scale of that of Charles Clarke is harder to deal with. A total of 1,023 prisoners were released without any consideration being given to deportation some of whom were originally jailed for serious offences including murder and rape. Foreign nationals can either be deported upon conviction of a crime of if the Home Office applies for deportation before the end of there sentence; offenders convicted of serious offences can be arrested upon release.

Bureaucracy is the bane of good government and ultimately it is the directing force of any bureaucracy that takes the blame for its failures. Some foreign nationals have their sentence greatly extended due to the process of going through deportation hearings. On both counts it points to a system that is failing and is it is hard not to agree with opposition calls for Clarke to resign.

Failure and bureaucracy is something that right-wing critics always try to associate with state provided services. The revelations regarding the growing sizes of infant classes would seem to reinforce that view. Certainly they point to an ingrained problem with bureaucracies and thinking in a bureaucratic manner - success or failure is measured in terms of statistics and targets and not always in terms of actual quality of provision. Of course, the two can be related but not always.

For example, infant school is largely about social education. At the stage of learning infants are at, socialisation and social education should always be much more important than narrow academic achievement. Basic skills can be taught to a large group at once if proper attention is also given to individual needs and that is down to the provision of adequate class room staff.

Blair's government has often been accused of being more style than substance. However, not only has its image been severely damaged this week but its core credibility as a government is rapidly being brought into question. How much damage this will do at the polls has yet to be seen.