The pilot was dead, his instruments were smashed and fuel was leaking from the wreckage, deep in the Panamanian jungle. How could I get back to civilisation? Equipment lay around the crashed plane, including a compass, a machete, matches, a revolver, rum, a water carrier, a radio, food and plastic sheets. What should I take with me? The compass, I thought, and the rum (to light signal fires as I hacked my way to safety). Wrong. I should have stayed put and waited for rescue. I was doomed.

And I thought I was just seeking a job as a “protected learning time facilitator” with the Luton NHS Primary Care Trust. What was going on? What was happening was one small exercise in a monumental effort to waste the billions of pounds that taxpayers are being forced to pour into Gordon Brown’s grand design to revive the nanny state.

It is boom time for penpushers. Official figures show that one in four of us now works in the public sector — that’s more than 7m employees.

Every Wednesday the hefty Society supplement of The Guardian, journal of the new Labour salariat, is packed with freshly created posts paid for with public money — and I was being appraised on my suitability to join this huge workforce by means of a psychological test in a hot, noisy office in Luton. Research by the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank, shows that more than 30,000 jobs were advertised in Society over space of 12 months, paying a combined total of more than £1 billion in salaries and other benefits.

Yet that is only part of the picture. In all, 150,000 new public sector jobs were created in the past year. Public sector pay rises now outstrip those in the private sector.

“There’s a lot of money out there,” one NHS line manager confessed cheerily last week.

Hence Luton’s hunt for a protected learning time facilitator. Hence, too, the ludicrous and expensive tests that applicants for this mysterious post had to undergo.

This was one of 60 equally outlandish jobs for which I have applied under various guises in a four-month investigation into the public sector bonanza. My quest into this strange world was disturbing. It really is a jungle out there, inhabited by some bizarre creatures.

STEP aside Mr Plod the Policeman; shuffle up Mr Stamp the Postman — a whole new series of public employees has joined the Happy Families game. Here’s Mr Rights the anti-racism co-ordinator, Mrs Strict of the council’s smoking cessation unit and Miss Celery the healthy eating officer from the digestion support team. Look, there’s Mr Lengthy-Forms the targets monitor, to make sure they all measure up to government standards. And here’s Mr Brown the stealth-tax-and-spend invigilator.

Gordon Brown’s National Insurance rises and other measures are the equivalent of a 7p increase in the basic rate of income tax since Labour came to power, according to a study carried out by the accountants Tenon for the think tank Reform.

The chancellor has promised a “world class” National Health Service in return for lightening our wallets. But critics see a flaw in his proposal — a fundamental paradox in the funding and provision of public services.

He has put in place the managers who will preside over the overhauled health service but not the frontline doctors and nurses, who are still being trained. Between 1997, when Labour came to power, and 2002 the number of qualified doctors and nurses in the NHS rose by 15.3%, while managers and senior managers increased by 45.6%.

It is possible that, because of the economic cycle, there could well be little money available to pay for the new doctors and nurses by the time they do, eventually, emerge from training.