I attended the immolation of a quango the other day. It was a sad affair. A small body, its members mostly unpaid, had been advising the Scottish Government on which historic monuments should be saved, refurbished and rescued from the ravages of time. It gave sound, expert, independent advice. And so, of course, it had to go. David Cameron would doubtless have approved. He favours the Bonfire of the Quangos.

Like so many snappy slogans — Never Had it So Good, British Jobs for British Workers, Arbeit Macht Frei — it is dishonest. And knowingly dishonest too. The title, with its echo of the Bonfire of the Vanities, suggests that what is being burnt is worthless. Quangos, we are meant to assume, are a self-indulgent frivolity.

I resent that. As a former quango man (Scottish Arts Council, 1996-2001), I was part of an organisation driven, ultimately, by one thing — a passion for the arts. It did decent, important work at a fraction of the cost of a government body. Its council members gave their time and expertise free, and only the chairman (me) was paid. Not a huge amount — £22,000, which was reduced after I left to about £13,000. I doubt if a salary cut of this size would be received without protest in Whitehall.

Of course, quangos are an easy target. There are, apparently, 1,162 of them in Britain, they employ 700,000 officials, they cost £64 billion. It is not hard to poke fun at bodies like the Advisory Committee on Packaging, the National Non-Food Crops Centre, or the Hearing Aid Council (“For God’s sake, speak up, man”). But going through the list, it is surprisingly hard to pinpoint ones we really do not need. I certainly hope the five people working on the Radioactive Waste Management Committee survive, for instance, and I warm to the single person, unpaid, who represents the Darwin Advisory Committee; I trust that he (or she) will be fit enough to survive.

The point that Mr Cameron has to prove is that the functions carried out by these semi-independent bodies can be delivered more cheaply and efficiently once they are subsumed into larger government bodies. The omens are not good. The last report on Civil Service cost cutting showed that nearly £900 million has been spent paying off 15,000 civil servants over the past four years, while an extra 42,000 have been recruited.

I dare say there are quangos that are overstaffed. But before a match is struck, let us remember the cumbersome, rule-obsessed, centrally directed organisations that will certainly have to be invented to take their place.

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