"This is a government so incompetent that they will let out 30,000 prisoners ahead of time this year because they didn't plan for the right number, so blundering that they lost the name and address of every child in the country, so cack-handed that their leak of stamp duty changes hit the housing market instead of helping it, so staggeringly inept that you meet Labour MPs who are misty-eyed about the good old days of John Prescott, when only his half of the government was in chaos rather than the entire administration," he said.

Hague accused Brown of "seeking to make a virtue of the government's lack of any new purpose, direction, or ideas".

"According to Gordon Brown, however abysmal the performance of the British government under his leadership, no one else in the country could possibly do any better," he said.