There is a solid body of opinion in the Labour party that thinks Alan Johnson’s presentational skills make him the only man who could save the party from electoral defeat. Thus it was the home secretary who was wheeled out to defend the granting of £47m of bonuses to Ministry of Defence officials — against a background of mounting complaints at the inadequate protection given to troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

Clearly Bob Ainsworth, the hapless defence secretary, could not be entrusted with so delicate a political bomb-disposal operation; yet Johnson showed that even he was not up to this task with his remark that the bonuses were appropriate for the “very difficult and sometimes dangerous job” that MoD officials had to do. Yes, secretary of state, staple guns can nip a bit — but this was hardly best calculated to assuage the anger of those on the front line and their families.

Johnson was presumably referring to those officials who have actually been out to Afghanistan to develop equipment designed to defend the troops; yet no fewer than 50,000 of the MoD’s 85,000 officials are to receive “performance bonuses” and only a tiny percentage of them would have experienced the sorts of conditions described by the home secretary. It makes you wonder how many would have received bonuses if the MoD’s defence procurement had not been described as incompetent from top to bottom in an official report three months ago.

That extraordinary figure of 50,000 shows how bonuses in the public sector have become routine rather than exceptional. According to one senior civil servant of my acquaintance, it was Gordon Brown who was behind the rapid spread of “performance” bonuses throughout the ranks of officialdom. The bonus element is worth about 10% of salary, but, says my friend, “Brown wanted it to rise to 30%, and even against the worsening financial background it was incredibly difficult to persuade him to drop the idea”.

Gordon Brown cannot, at least, be blamed for the salary structure at the BBC, which revealed last week that 37 of its executives “earn more than the prime minister”. That was how the headline writers chose to get across the sense that the BBC’s management is enjoying rather too much of the high life at the licence payers’ expense; although one might equally observe that, at £192,414, the prime ministerial pay is being kept artificially low, largely for political reasons.

I started my journalistic career at the BBC in 1980 and back then I was amazed by the obscurity of some of the executives’ job titles with their improbably long acronyms, as frequently advertised in the appointments section on notice boards throughout Broadcasting House. Even so, I could not have envisaged that 30 years later someone with the title “COO, FM&T” would be paid £182,000 a year; still less that there would be someone called “chief adviser, vision”, who would receive a salary of £103,300. Add to these figures the fact that such executives will receive a fully indexed final-salary pension and you might begin to see why, in my sixth decade, I sometimes wonder if I did the right thing by moving into the uncertain private-sector world of newspapers.

The BBC has justified these salaries — including even the £6m a year that it has been shovelling in Jonathan Ross’s direction — as being “necessary to compete with the private sector”.

The real point is not just that under Labour average pay rates in the public sector have overtaken the rewards of the less secure private sector, but that the sheer number of state employees has grown much more rapidly than the expansion of the workforce as a whole — a situation that would be unsustainable even without an economic recession.

The mushrooming of so-called quangos is the most commonly cited illustration; but what is fascinating is that even as the government has attempted to cut their ranks, their cost has continued to rise as, hydra-like, those remaining take on ever more staff. While in 2001 there were almost 1,200 “semi-autonomous public bodies”, costing £20 billion a year to run, by last year there were 800 such bodies, costing £34.5 billion. As these regulatory bodies grow in size and scope, they may lose sight of the interests of those they were designed to help, but the one function they never forget is self-protection.

Take, for example, Ofsted. This was the organisation originally designed to monitor schools, which then spread its tentacles into the field of childcare. You may recall that it gave Haringey council a “three star” rating for its child protection just days after Baby P had died. In the uproar that followed, Ofsted reassessed its original findings and declared Haringey’s child protection standards to be “the worst we have ever seen”.

This was sufficient to get the council to sack Sharon Shoesmith, its head of child services, thus in turn allowing the government to have the necessary head on a platter. Shoesmith sued Haringey for unfair dismissal. Her lawyers alleged that drafts of Ofsted’s second report on her department were less severe than the final version, which was crafted to make her, as they claimed, a scapegoat.

Ofsted initially refused to hand over such drafts on the grounds that they were “irrelevant and unnecessary”; when the High Court judge hearing the case rejected this, Ofsted then claimed that such drafts did not exist. Last week it finally “discovered” them, to the evident consternation of Mr Justice Foskett, who wanted to know how “draft reports did not exist — and now they do”. There are only two explanations: either Ofsted was dishonestly covering up its own paper trail in defiance of a court order — or it is staggeringly incompetent. The one fact that we can assert with near-certainty is that no one at Ofsted will be sacked over this.

Similarly, we know of no one among the 23,000 people employed in the MoD’s procurement arm losing their job (or even their bonus) after the official report in August revealing that “the MoD does not really know the price of any kit, and project management does not exist”. One reason for this chaos must be the improbably vast number of officials involved: Israel, with all its technologically advanced military capability, manages its defence procurement with no more than 400 officials.

This has long been characteristic of the British defence establishment. The naval historian C Northcote Parkinson (he of Parkinson’s law) observed that between 1914 and 1928, while the Royal Navy’s complement of ships in commission fell by more than two-thirds and the number of naval officers and men dropped by more than 30%, the number of officials in the Admiralty rose by almost 80%. Parkinson concluded in deadpan style by observing that he would make no moral judgment about the growth of departments of state: “Those who hold that this growth is essential to gain full employment are fully entitled to their opinion. Those who doubt the stability of an economy based upon reading each other’s minutes are equally entitled to theirs.”

At least the governments of that era were directly accountable for such expenditures of taxpayers’ money; the peculiarity of new Labour is that it has funnelled unfeasibly vast sums — and ever more functions — to organisations that are not answerable daily to parliament. These bodies need to be closed down wholesale. Fortunately for the aspirant Conservative administration, a colossal budget deficit can be used as a justification; but the truth is that even if we had a surplus — rather than an annual deficit approaching £200 billion — it would be the right thing to do.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

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