LONDON BRIEFING/CHRIS JOHNS: Just before I left the UK Treasury in 1986, I was taken aside by a senior government economist, who assured me that I would be made redundant from my new job in the City within six months.

His logic was impeccable. Impending deregulation meant that investment banks and brokers could no longer act as a price-fixing cartel and would have to start competing. Price competition would mean, according to this very smart chap, that stockbroking profits would secularly decline and the City economist would quickly become extinct as banks sought to cut costs in non-essential areas.

It was hard to fault his thinking, but I went to the City anyway, dazzled by the prospect of doubling my civil service salary, even it was only going to last a short time.

Of course, the important official was wrong in just about every aspect of his argument. I managed to hold my career together - and so did the very clever government economist. He is now one of the Treasury's most senior officials, holding great responsibility and power.

Getting things wrong didn't hold me back too much and certainly hasn't done the average Treasury official any harm.

Many of the people who presided over the great economic debacles of the past 20 years are still in situ or have taken up various well-paying posts in the private sector.

The prime example, Lord Burns, was the top civil servant during sterling's ejection from the European exchange-rate mechanism.

He emerged unscathed from that period and has recently had a flourishing career as non-executive director and chairman of several large companies. His name has been mentioned in the context of one or two vacancies at the BBC.

Critics of the Treasury usually get the silent treatment: Olympian disdain for mere mortals is often a key characteristic of Treasury officials. They are usually very aware of their own cleverness.

More recent attacks on Gordon Brown's great department of state have usually focused on the burdens imposed on business by ever increasing regulation.

The Confederation of British Industry has been grumbling for years about red tape being heaped on industry by a government that seems to want to micromanage just about everything.

The Chancellor's control freakery has been manifest in all sorts of ways, not least in the countless times he has introduced seemingly trivial measures with the aim of boosting Britain's productivity.

Uncharacteristically, the Treasury has come out fighting. Apparently, it is extremely cheesed off with repeated accusations of futile meddling and is about to publish a book giving details of its successes.

The publisher's blurb gives a good sense of what the book is intended to achieve. "The reforms in microeconomic policy described in this volume provide the framework for improving Britain's overall productivity, expanding national wealth and protecting the environment. The government's approach to raising productivity across all sectors and income groups, supporting families, and tackling poverty is presented, together with a detailed account of the reform of the delivery of public services."

All this achieved in only six short years! I'm looking forward to publication of this book, although I doubt if it will hit the bestseller lists. There are, of course, one or two problems with the claims made for the book.

Perhaps the biggest relates to that bit about raising productivity. The simple truth is that Mr Brown has not managed to alter Britain's relatively poor productivity performance one iota. And I do not know of anybody who thinks that the delivery of public services is even slightly better than when Labour came to power.

What is it about politicians and civil servants that they can see things which are invisible to the rest of us?

People usually infer all sorts of sinister motives. I think the truth is often far more prosaic. If any of these people had ever got on a train or had to stay for longer than five minutes in a public ward in an NHS hospital, we would have very different public services. If they had ever tried to run a business, they would have a very different perspective.

I suspect that many of our leaders are simply very disconnected from how most of their people live. Those are my prejudices anyway.

Perhaps it is just that very smart people often lack good judgment. Anybody who can publish a book called Microeconomic Reform in Britain: Delivering Enterprise and Fairness can hardly expect to get featured on Amazon.com. Surely someone could have come up with a catchier title?

And that same civil servant who so erroneously forecast the demise of the City economist is one of the authors of this book. No wonder I'm a sceptic.