If the government now feels that it has to reconsider its plans for a general election on 3 May, it has only itself to blame. Foot-and-mouth was not a national crisis. A section of a small, if significant, industry was in trouble. Some businesses faced bankruptcy, some workers faced redundancy, just as occurs in manufacturing industry almost daily. There was no threat to human health, no threat of starvation, no threat of mass unemployment. But politicians turned it into a crisis. Within a week of the outbreak, Nick Brown, the agriculture minister, called on "the entire nation" to "unite behind the government". He begged people to keep out of the countryside, warned journalists against visiting farms or even flying helicopters over them, sought the closure of legal rights of way. He declared it "a matter of life and death" to the farming industry. MPs fell over each other in outrage that people still dared to go walking in Snowdonia.

The idea that an election should be postponed because of problems, no matter how grave, in a single industry is preposterous. That Tony Blair can stay in office for another year is beside the point. For the past 50 years, governments have routinely gone to the country after four years, the only exceptions being those who expected to lose. But the voters (who do not take politics as seriously as either politicians or journalists) now wonder why, if this is indeed a crisis and not just a gigantic photo-opportunity in which we can all admire the ministerial straining of sinews, it can possibly be wise to set about something so frivolous as electioneering. If it is right to wreck the season's prospects for tourism in Devon and the Lake District, if it is right to cancel sporting and social events, people ask, how can it be right to hold an election, with armies of politicians, television cameras and assorted hangers-on charging about the country? Ministers argue that postponement of the election would send "the wrong signal" about Britain to the world. But it is already too late: American tourists, notorious scaredy-cats, have already seen the billowing clouds of smoke on CNN and think Britain is burning.

What is serious is not the disease among animals but the disease in British government. The symptoms are rigidity of policy, an obsession with national image and pride, and an extraordinary lack of joined-upness. We must throw cattle and sheep on to burning pyres because that is what we have always done. It is the British way; vaccination is for wimps and devious foreigners. In 1999, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria suffered outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease; the use of vaccine got them under control in six weeks or less. In 1996, Macedonia controlled an outbreak within three weeks. But these, in the Ministry of Agriculture's view, are weak, primitive, inferior nations. In the perverse logic of this ministry, it is somehow more advanced to use the 19th century's approach to controlling the disease than to deploy the best resources of modern science.

Vaccination would cost about £15m; the cost of the slaughter policy will be close to £200m. The only argument against vaccination that has been put with any conviction is that it would lead to a ban on British exports even after the disease has been eradicated, because it is impossible to distinguish between vaccinated animals and those carrying the foot-and-mouth virus. The best estimate - from Professor Peter Midmore, an agricultural economist at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth - is that the value of the threatened exports is an annual £310m, or 0.17 per cent of the UK total. If farming existed in a sort of bubble, insulated from the rest of the world, as the Ministry of Agriculture seems to think, the slaughter would therefore seem cost beneficial. But even on Professor Midmore's quite conservative estimate, tourism will lose £600m.

There can be no conceivable national interest in favouring the farming over the tourist industry. Even if we never exported another side of beef or leg of lamb, it wouldn't be a national disaster - not more so, at any rate, than our incapacity to export mass-market cars, ships or coal. Tourism, by contrast, is one of the world's fastest-expanding industries. If the Cabinet ever met for more than a few minutes, it might have weighed these considerations. Instead, Whitehall inertia ruled: farming has a department dedicated to its producer interests; tourism does not. Farming has a whole propaganda machine that reaches for the language of crisis after a few days of unusual weather; tourism has never acquired such a vocabulary.

The date of the election will make very little difference. Even a year's delay is unlikely to jeopardise a Labour victory. The government deserves to win, and will do so; the Conservatives deserve to lose, and will do so. What really matters is how Britain is governed. Mr Blair promised to modernise it, rationalise it, join it up. The foot-and-mouth episode shows how far he is from realising those aspirations. One of the priorities of the second term will be to get to grips with Whitehall. The sooner, the better. For that reason alone, the Prime Minister should still go to the polls on 3 May.

To brag or not to brag

A bonus of £759,000, according to Sir George Mathewson, deputy chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland (who has received that sum for taking over NatWest), "wouldn't have given you bragging power in a Soho wine-bar". Various interesting questions arise, not including "Is Sir George an overpaid fat cat?" - to which the dull answer is yes. Does Sir George himself frequent Soho wine bars? And does he brag, or wish to brag, about his earnings? Possibly, Sir George meant that £759,000 was a proper sum for a gentleman and that greater sums were for the kind of vulgar people who brag in Soho wine-bars. But if he meant that such bragging is now common practice in the upper social echelons, it represents a significant change. British philanthropy, we are led to believe, compares poorly to US philanthropy because rich Britons do not like people to know they have money. Can we now expect that, if they are bragging even in Soho, they will open their tight wallets and give more of it away?

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