Masters of the Universe - dontcha just love 'em? This is a bad time for the Great and the Good. The current global phenomenon is the rug being pulled from under the mighty ones. Not a day goes by but another group of sages is exposed for the buffoons they actually are. The truth is, we are ruled, in every aspect of our lives, by clowns arrogating to themselves the airs of philosopher kings.

The redundant deal-maker from Lehman Brothers clutching a black plastic bag as he makes his way out into deserved oblivion would not have given you the time of day a year ago. At dinner parties he would have sneered down anyone who suggested the remotest vulnerability in the Wall Street leviathan and opened another magnum of vintage champagne.

Ditto Gordon the Great, stranger to self-doubt, the guru of post neo-classical endogenous growth theory, who squandered the national kitty in a public-spending splurge in 2002 and now sits amid the ruins of the economy he undermined ("I am become the destroyer of pensions"...). Another buffoon in high places. Even the leader of the caring-sharing Liberal Democrats, who aspires to reshape the economy and welfare, has no idea how much the basic state pension is.

More lethal are the overgrown schoolboys at CERN, about to recreate the Big Bang - for fun. There is absolutely no danger, they patronisingly insist, bolstered by a phalanx of cultists who, from a posture of impudent ignorance, sneer down all questioners as hyper-confidently as Lehman Brothers bankers did in their sphere not long ago. The tired canard that what they are doing is no different from the effects of cosmic rays - a claim that any sixth-former knows is inaccurate - is typical of the bluster that masks their planetary irresponsibility.

The other infallible dogma is man-made global warming, with the "melting" of the polar ice-cap so advanced that an environmental propagandist in a kayak cannot canoe northwards to within 100 miles of where a predecessor paddled a century ago, when the ice was supposedly more widespread. Yet the BBC broadcasts climate change propaganda as relentlessly as Radio Moscow extolling tractor production figures in the Caucasus, circa 1949.

This is the age of fools in high places. We are ruled by naked emperors - and it is our fault for submitting to them.

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