Another blunder: judge for yourselves

Straw, in a letter to Short, has assured her the portal does not contain personal data, but friends of the solicitor said the information available was 'sensitive'. The solicitor says: "They were very surprised I had received it."

The discovery of yet more blunders - including the weekend admission by the Ministry of Defence that one of its computers had been stolen containing personal details of thousands of service applicants - has raised doubts about Straw's support for an ID card system. It also threatens to undermine confidence in the review by Kieran Poynter into the cause of the notorious loss of CDs from HM Customs and Revenue.

The solicitor believes he must have been on the Justice Department's data base because he used to chair welfare benefit tribunals - but he has not done so for 10 years.

“They set up an email account for me to email judges. I spoke to a girl with an Australian accent who didn't seem very bright. She said just post it back to her. It is yet another example of a government that couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.”