Is there a point at which the Home Office has been so debased that it has to be officially downgraded from one of the "great ­offices of state"? At the present rate, it must be close to being relegated to some fifth-tier ­department of the sort one wouldn't mind putting Geoff Hoon in charge of.

This week, the Home Office Players have brought you the continuing Gurkhas fiasco, the news that it was to retain the genetic profiles of innocents on its DNA database, and the list of no-marks it is banning from entering the UK even if they don't want to come.

The troupe of farceurs includes Phil Woolas, whose turn as Joanna Lumley's ventriloquist's dummy on Thursday was so hilarious that it cannot be long before he is offered a summer season in Bridlington. And it is headed up by dear old Jacqui Smith, who took a while to emerge as the Brown government's breakout halfwit, but has been making up for it ever since with a series of blunders so blatant that you could be forgiven for assuming she is in the pay of a far-east betting syndicate.

But oh, that list! It somehow ­contrived to characterise the department's entire ethos, combining an intellectually bankrupt token gesture with a monstrous insult to its own citizens, whom it evidently deems too thick to dismiss these people as poisonous fools. Even more typically, it embodied the retreat into lobotomised political correctness, taking care to ensure that white folks such as the American shock jock Michael Savage were included to demonstrate balance.

The balance point is almost beyond parody. I mean, as a woman, I cannot believe that in 2009 we are still seeing all-male shortlists of people the home secretary wouldn't fancy a pint with. Where's Chemical Sally – or Huda Ammash, as she was known outside the Washington DC universe, where her superpower was anthrax? Last heard of living in Jordan, Chemical Sally's ­holiday plans are unknown. But the point is, would we want her here, ­Jacqui, gadding about the Lake District as though she were born to it? Or consider those frightful little blonde twins who were on a Louis Theroux documentary a few years back, whose apple-pie prettiness is complemented by a distinctly lively catalogue of white nationalist songs. A sort of ­neo-Nazi version of the Olsen twins, their band is called Prussian Blue, and its fans simply laps up hits like Aryan Man Awake.

One can only assume that hateful women are still held back by a glass ceiling, because there are plenty of ladies who could make the cut on this preposterous list if its compilers had been blessed with a slightly more ­lavish research budget. Then again, they did put the hours in. When the list was greeted with disbelief and ridicule, Home Office drones were required to expend civil service time trawling the internet for offensive statements Savage had made, at the same time as emphasising that six names couldn't be released "for national security reasons". Five Pakistani students and David Icke, then.

If you can judge anything by its ­enemies, this list is just another ­testament to the pathetic smallness of the UK under New Labour.

You'd think they'd have clicked by now that virtually everyone against whom they set themselves is ­desperately, delightedly grateful for the attention. Once again, let's revisit the adage about dealing with people such as Michael Savage or Abu Hamza, or any of the other pygmies we've been ordered to fixate upon in recent times. "Never fight with a pig," this runs. "You both get dirty but the pig enjoys it."

Hamza used to hold his hook up so photographers could get both that central casting appendage and his mad milky eye in the same shot. Why? Because he was a professional, a one-take pantomime villain. Just like Savage, who is now pledging to sue the government using our anti-free speech laws, the absence of which in his US homeland is the only thing that allows him to earn his crust. And because of that other ­unedifying British accolade – our status as the libel capital of the world – he will probably win.

Yet this chap who was born Mr Weiner is nothing but a silly ­little sausage whom we have now edified to the status of international supervillain, much in the manner we insist on referring to idiotic and incompetent would-be murderers as "terrorists", an honorific even Margaret Thatcher was always studious not to apply to the IRA.

Still, confected bogeymen come and go, and there'll be another one along in a minute. The real scandal, of course, which will endure long after Jacqui Smith has been freed up to spend more time with her bathplugs, is the retention of innocents' DNA in a flagrant sidestepping of a European human rights ruling. It's customary when decrying the DNA database to focus on what would happen should such potent material fall into the wrong hands. This week, we surely reached the point at which even the most slavishly deferential can concur that the very hands in which it currently resides are the wrong hands. How much wronger their hands can get, only time will show. But on current form, rule nothing bar competence out.