Gieve urged to resign from BoE

It said a National Audit Office review of the Home Office's accounts for 2004-05 has revealed errors 'so wild that they beggared belief.'

The newspaper reported that information produced when Gieve was called to give evidence before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday showed that the NAO found that problems with the Home Office's new computer system, Adelphi, had led it to get its sums massively wrong.

It said the gross value of the debits and credits recorded by the Home Office totaled 26,527 bln stg -- 1.3 times the GDP of the entire planet and 2,000 times the Home Office budget.

When this error was eradicated, the Home Office still had a 1 bln stg discrepancy in its budget -- 5 pct of the total, the newspaper said.

It quoted Richard Bacon, Conservative MP and member of the PAC, as saying: 'It is an eloquent comment on the nature of public appointments by this government that Sir John can leave a catastrophic mess at the Home Office and walk into a job as deputy governor of the Bank of England. This is the sort of thing you'd expect in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.'