IF it were not so painful, you would have to laugh. I mean, last week the BBC introduced the winner of Teacher of the Year.

I listened and found myself becoming ever more excited as the minutes went by. What had this teacher done to earn so prestigious a prize? Perhaps he had inspired his eight year olds with Latin verse or got them to recite the battle scenes from the siege of Troy? Or maybe taught slightly older children the fun in learning to solve quadratic equations by using Descartes' formula?

Don't be silly! We are talking about education, English style. He had asked his children to write a story about something that made them "really angry". Getting them to "express themselves", you see. I wish I'd been there for his lesson, for I bet he said, "Reelly, reelly angry".

Then, interviewed as to "how he felt" - the BBC knows its audience well and always asks them how they feel and never how they think - the teacher described himself thus, "I was sat..." He also confessed he had never read a serious newspaper. Please note, this was the best teacher they could find.

That award, Teacher of the Year, is only a symptom of the universal sham which passes for life in Britain today. So the Teacher of the Year cannot speak English properly? That has proved no drawback to him in achieving distinction in his profession. But consider the opportunities which might otherwise be open to him. He might choose to go into politics where the functional operation of perpetual sham is the hallmark of the trade. Take the Home Office, for example, which this week is boasting about the slowdown in the increase of crime. It is a measure of their failure that there has been no decrease but only a slightly less swift increase.

Even this is not true. There were 30 times as many burglaries last year as in 1964. Imagine it: if you could expect to be burgled once a year 40 years ago, you must expect to be burgled every fortnight today. Also last year the number of murders in Britain exceeded 1,000 for the first time. This means that since the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, no murderers have been executed; but there have been four or five times the number of people murdered. Therefore, the abolition of the death penalty has been followed by the killing of none of the guilty but of more innocent people than ever.

If our candidate's accomplishments turn out to be not so highly estimated that he manages to find a job in the Home Office, never mind - with a Dip Ed he is sure to find a niche massaging the figures in the Department of Employment. Here the boast is made that unemployment is at record low levels. They forget to add that this is after Gordon Brown has created half a million non-jobs in the public sector. The Government has also increased by ten times the number of people in receipt of disability benefit - most of whom in times past would have been judged perfectly fit to do a day's work.

Well, with all those on the sick list, perhaps it would be appropriate to find work in the Department of Health? But anyone with an ounce of moral scruple would die of shame at our hospitals. The propaganda ceaselessly tells us that the NHS is "the envy of the world". Which world is this, exactly? Figures out last week, for example, show that Britain has the worst record in Europe for deaths from respiratory diseases, more than twice the number in Latvia and the Czech Republic.

Why not Sucker of the Year? No good - we'd all win it.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.