The strange thing is that although politicians and public figures lie shamelessly and people know they do, we journalists — we reptiles of the gutter — have to be extremely wary of using the L word. Yet we ourselves are accused regularly of lying, and with impunity; rather like the royal family, journalists almost never sue for libel. Contrary to what people think, we’re not really allowed to hand it out, but we have to take it.

I do not know whether Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, actually accused the journalists who exposed the Islington child sex scandals of lying, precisely; she certainly lodged complaints against them with the Press Complaints Commission and accused them of sensational gutter journalism. Yet in the end it proved that they were telling the truth and that she was — well, what was she doing? I couldn’t say.

In late June an article appeared in The Times beside a photograph of Dr Gill Morgan, head of the NHS Confederation, with the headline “The ‘lie’ that haunts the NHS”. Lying, even now, is no minor matter and the National Health Service is hugely important to us all, so naturally

I read on.

I have written about NHS waste and bureaucracy many times — and recently. In response Morgan has accused me publicly of “ignorance” and of making a “claim” that is “baseless”; two senior colleagues backed her up and this paper, properly, offered them a right of reply and printed what they said.

“Common sense alone,” she added in her letter to this paper, “makes it highly improbable that an organisation that has been underfunded for years would fritter away money on non-essential jobs.” What can one say? “Improbable”? I don’t think so. And a general appeal to common sense is not exactly a knock-down argument, you might think. Besides, common experience suggests something rather different, in the NHS and in all bureaucracy anywhere. Only last Friday, for instance, the NHS Alliance reported that GPs feel they have lost their power to managers; they feel that primary care trusts are driven not by doctors but by bureaucrats and by an alienating managerial culture.

The “lie” that Morgan was apparently talking about in The Times had to do with the same subject — excessive bureaucracy in the NHS. “At the start of the year,” the article said, “a wholly fictitious story appeared in the national press claiming that there were more bureaucrats than beds”; “the accusation has spread” it went on, and was becoming an “established fact”, but it was so wrong that it could not be allowed to stand. That is Morgan’s view — I checked. She believes it’s a myth based on a misunderstanding and a misuse of the figures.

“This was a cheap and easy attack,” she said to The Times. As a matter of fact, such attacks are not cheap and easy; they involve endless trawling through complicated government figures and endless checking; all this takes a lot of effort and money. Only people who really mind about the NHS would bother.

One such person is Dr Maurice Slevin, a distinguished NHS oncologist. Early this year he produced a telling pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies with the support of many other distinguished consultants; he argued from Department of Health figures showing that the NHS has far too many managers, administrators and bureaucrats. The proportion is 25.7% of the total workforce, or one in four — an astonishing figure. By contrast, in the private sector, comparing like for like, the proportion is under 7%.

Putting it another way, in the NHS there are eight administrators for every 10 qualified nurses, whereas in the private sector there are two administrators for every 10 qualified nurses. By administrators Slevin means managers, administrators and their support staff.

It has been argued by Morgan and her colleagues that Slevin has included essential staff such as doctors’ secretaries as well as cooks, cleaners and painters.

But they must know that this is not true because his pamphlet explained how the figures were calculated, specifically excluding these people.

If the NHS could lose only some of the bureaucrats, he argued, it could save billions of pounds, raise the salaries of nurses and radiographers and recruit more medical staff without raising taxes. Instead NHS bureaucracy is getting more top heavy and more expensive; the new money is not delivering.

Slevin’s is one of the best researched and most eloquent versions of the “lie” (produced, incidentally, in his free time and without payment). To call his argument a lie is, in effect, to call him, and all those who make the same case, a liar. That cannot be right.

I am aware that Morgan did not write the headline in The Times. She may not have wished to use the word “lie”. She may not wish to call Slevin’s argument a lie, or even “wholly fictitious”. So I invited her, repeatedly, to dissociate herself from that headline. She has not done so.

This whole argument turns on how you count bureaucrats and how you identify them. “Managers” and “administrators” and “support staff” are terms that are all too flexible, all too susceptible to spin. Morgan has complained that while the public thinks 20% of NHS employees are managers or senior managers, the real proportion is only 2.6%, down from 3% in 2001.

Spot the obvious disjunction. The total of senior managers and managers in the “manager” grade is not, and cannot be, anything like the total of all managers plus all administrators plus all secondary support staff and so on. What’s more, the public does not make arcane distinctions between managerial or administrative grades when worrying about bureaucracy. The public simply means everyone who is not directly involved with treating the sick. How truthful was it to state the case this way?

It should be — it was until recently — possible to define one’s terms properly and settle this argument. It ought to be easy to figure out who does what, as Slevin could last year, using Department of Health figures. But no longer. According to Slevin, the department has recently, for reasons I have not discovered, changed the way it publishes these statistics; it is now impossible to see what the hundreds of thousands of administrators and their support staff do because they have been reclassified as “support to doctors and nurses” and other similar descriptions.

It is immensely depressing, at a time when the NHS needs all the informed, constructive analysis it can get, that it should suddenly be harder to get at the truth. It’s immensely depressing that serious attempts to get at the truth should be dismissed as a lie. As they say, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

And now there are lies, damned lies and statistical spin as well.