UNDERCURRENT: James Cusick

THAT sage and modern prophet of American politics, Donald Rumsfeld, once remarked that the United States couldn't afford an amateur in the White House. If Rumsfeld thought George Bush was a qualified professional, then, judging by the past seven years of Dubya's administration, his theory is shot to hell. Bring on the gifted, honest amateurs and the planet stands a chance.

The National Audit Office, however, disagrees. It mourns a lack of qualified accountants among Whitehall's rank of permanent secretaries. In the NAO report published last week, a "lack of financial skills and awareness" was identified as a "significant barrier" to improving management of the some £678 billion spent by the government each year. The report asks, where are all the best accountants hiding when they could be in the civil service?

You could sense a finger was being pointed at Sir Gus O'Donnell. He has no accountancy qualifications and yet is the cabinet secretary. He wasted his academic years reading economics at the University of Warwick, taking a masters in philosophy at Oxford and lecturing at Glasgow University. He was an economist at the Treasury, and worked as first secretary of the economics division at the British embassy in Washington.

But there's no mention of accountancy in his CV, as is the case with many other Whitehall mandarins. In place of sensible accountancy qualifications, there's just Oxbridge firsts in history, modern languages, physics PhDs and so on.

Accountants know money, says the NAO. And because the Commons benches are stuffed with qualified lawyers, you might expect the NAO to say politicians must know law.

Politicians like Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Lord Goldsmith and Geoff Hoon all know more about international law, we have learned, than the United Nations. All qualified barristers but without any experience of international law, they knew enough to know those in the White House must know better; so they all took Bush's advice on Iraq.

So what happens when you don't have a qualification in accountancy? Hard to say. Look at Bernie Ebbers. He graduated from Mississippi College with a bachelor's degree in physical education, but instead went on to found WorldCom, acquire MCI, and in 2005 be convicted of fraud and conspiracy in the largest financial scandal in US history, over false accounting that lost US investors some $11 billion and cost Ebbers 25 years in jail.

If only Ebbers had plumped for accountancy, or law, rather than PE, all that trouble could have been avoided.