Watching Iain Duncan Smith place all blame for the snowballing fiasco that is his universal credit policy at the foot of civil servants this week, the mind turned to that moment in The Office which cuts to Gareth Keenan on the phone. "Basically, I've checked all other possibilities," he is saying mulishly, "and it's come down to the calculator."

Two months ago, Mr Duncan Smith freed himself from the restraints of evidence-based argument when challenged with official statistics contradicting his claims for the success of his benefits cap policy. "The reality is," he declared to John Humphrys on BBCRadio 4's Today programme of his wholly unsubstantiated gut feeling, "I believe that to be right." So there isn't a chance that this week's damning National Audit Office report on the progress of universal credit will force the work and pensions secretary's supertanker off course. And in this ineluctable journey, we must wish the "quiet man" godspeed. Those icebergs won't hit themselves, after all.

The government's own auditors have concluded that Duncan Smith's flagship reform is an IT Horlicks – not their exact words, you understand, though they did chuck in "weak management", "poor governance" and a "fortress mentality". About £34m has been wasted so far, but the big numbers are all to play for, given the audit office's vaguely horrifying observation that "throughout the programme the department has lacked a detailed view of how universal credit was meant to work". This you might take as a somewhat damning verdict on Duncan Smith – unless, of course, you were Duncan Smith, in which case you'd bravely declare you'd "lost faith" in your juniors.

Dear old IDS. It is difficult to judge whether he would have been overpromoted were he to find himself assistant regional manager at Wernham Hogg (or even assistant to the regional manager). But hand on heart, you might struggle to come up with a single line of work in the world in which he would have really excelled. A fastidiously shoe-shone testament to the lament that modern British politics doesn't attract the best and the brightest, Duncan Smith would, in a true meritocracy, have come out of a distinctly average stint in the army and taken a position as a bursar of some minor public school clinging desperately to the Sussex cliffs. Look, I'm not saying it would have been great for the school. Even as bits of the science lab were claimed by the waves, he would have been insisting on the impending success of his facilities renewal plan, or blaming a lack of commitment in the scree.

What it would have done, though, is spared us the ministrations of the most dangerous political type, of which Duncan Smith is unquestionably one. Consider again that refusal to allow the benefit cap statistics to affect his alternative reality. "The reality is, I believe that to be right." If that has a faintly chilling echo of Tony Blair's WMD gospel – "I only know what I believe" – then the zeal which underpins it has not entirely reassured even his own side.

George Osborne's biographer suggested the chancellor was troubled by Duncan Smith's Christian sense of mission as far as universal credit was concerned, questioning his "analytic rigour". As a Treasury source put it: "He thinks the people pushing this are such total advocates and evangelicals that they blind themselves to any downsides."

Whatever you think of Osborne, he was on to something with that unease. The most dangerous people in politics are usually not the pantomime villains, nor even the quietly nasty characters, but the ones who think incredibly complex things are perfectly simple. Consider David Freud, the investment banker New Labour charged with addressing welfare reform. "I didn't know anything about welfare at all when I started," he subsequently breezed. "But that may have been an advantage … In a funny way, the solution was obvious." His initial report into a problem with which the finest minds have wrestled for decades took him a mere three weeks to research and complete.

These days, he is Lord Freud (obviously), and has put the breadth of his learning at the disposal of the Tories – indeed, he currently functions as Duncan Smith's minister, and the pair seem ideally suited, apparently resistant to the notion that the admirable goal of simplifying a system is immensely nuanced and intractable task.

Still, do let's hope all becomes clear, one way or another. At present, we must accept at face value the government's apparent belief that the best person to hector the poor about their fecklessness and how it's the root of all late capitalist societal evils is the bloke who sponged off his father-in-law by living rent-free in a £2m country house, and whose response to the excoriating criticisms of his government's own auditors is to blame the servants (the civil variety, in this case).

But perhaps in 30 years, the release of papers will confirm the secretary of state for work and pensions in fact took his seat at the cabinet table as part of a trialling affirmative action scheme. As a nice, light brief – a mere trifle, really – it is the department they tend to use for such things (you'll recall it was the one Blair handed to David Blunkett when he was acting even more strangely than he had been during the business that had caused his first resignation just a few months before). Maybe one day, then, we'll be able to adjust our expectations and accept the DWP was just Whitehall's equivalent of making macrame pot holders.