When government fails it is a combination of the personal and the systemic, the temperamental and the structural. And nowhere more so than here. Government is naturally gnostic. People become ministers because they want to know secrets. The idea that government is full of secrets dies hard - even in age of instant information and increasing access.
Most government is dull.
But the insecure Ministerial Ego Erectus needs the fantasy of a private access to the state secret to compensate for its amphibian condition. Behind the rise of that ego lies a slimy trail of conventional crawling and compulsive creeping. Sometimes a genuine secret does arrive. But instead of gratifying the ego it isolates and disables. Which is what happened in the case of successive agriculture ministers.