To mark the recent Euromillions draw, in which two winning tickets were worth more than £45 million each, the BBC website rang a tongue-in-cheek article on what you still cannot get for that impressive sum. On the list were big yachts, some of London’s most lavish houses, Cristiano Ronaldo and strangely, towards the bottom, a fighter jet.

You could add a new Chinook or Merlin helicopter, especially once you have crewed it and fitted it up for operations in Afghanistan. Which is why the recent furore over £47 million for MoD civil servants’ bonuses seems a little oversimplistic.

“The guys on the ground don’t have the kit they need, so why are staff in Whitehall spraying champagne in the corridors of Main Building?” So goes the familiar and trite argument, somewhat demeaned in this case by the media’s questionable enthusiasm for stoking faux outrage by exploiting the grief of recently bereaved families of servicemen who have lost their lives in the current conflict.

The problem with bonuses is that they conjure up images of Porsches and idiots in Mo*vida. The bonuses awarded to MoD staff wouldn’t cover a hedge fund manager’s lunch bill, let alone a sports car, and in most cases are less than £1,000 — a substantial, but not life-changing reward for some of the hardest-working staff.

The MoD deploys civilian staff into operational theatres. They work incredibly long hours facing similar conditions to many of the troops, who receive the tax-free operational bonus of more than £2,000 regardless of whether or not they find themselves on the front line. While appreciated by the military personnel they serve with, these men and women receive little or none of the recognition that soldiers do.

A friend of mine who recently left the Army and became a civil servant found himself back in Basra, working twice as hard as when he was in uniform, having taken a substantial pay cut. Most servicemen I know would rather be confident that the staff supporting them in Whitehall were recruited from the brightest and best and motivated to work as hard as many of them do. It is no secret that civil servants are paid poorly in comparison with many other graduates and if a small bonus scheme helps to maintain quality and morale it is surely a good thing.

There are issues at the MoD but to focus on millions of pounds of bonuses instead of billions of pounds of overspend and delay in dodgy procurement is rather like focusing on MPs’ hundred-pound expenses bills while the national debt increases by thousands of pounds an hour.

Soldiers on the front line need protected mobility and more boots on the ground. Procurement, recruitment and retention schemes and training are long-term, expensive programmes that can’t be swatted away with Urgent Operational Requirement purchases or bolstered by pinching relatively small sums from staff bonuses or the TA training budget. These are the real issues.

The legacy of this Government, as it mortgages off my generation, is that some very tough decisions will have to be taken and some impossible book-balancing done, and not just in the MoD. Let’s not begrudge the hard-working desk-jockeys a little boost; they’ll need it over the next year or so.

Patrick Hennessey is author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

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