The Prince of Wales, it is said, employs a manservant for the task of squeezing toothpaste on to the royal toothbrush. The servant cannot have the most demanding of careers, but he is almost certainly providing greater public utility than are many of the state’s bean-counters. Saving money, or rather the attempt to do so, is one of the fastest-growing areas of the public sector. Our national army of audit commissioners, value-for-money officers and best-practice co-ordinators is truly impressive. It is just a shame that in spite of them — or perhaps even partly because of them — taxpayers face an almost certain £10 billion worth of tax rises following the election. The whole exercise is typified by the NHS ‘Efficiency Unit’, which spent thousands of pounds booking hotel rooms for a conference which it later cancelled.
It is little wonder, given the government’s miserable failure to rein in its spending, that Labour’s minions should be busying themselves deflecting attention on to the housekeeping of the Prince of Wales and the accounts of the Duchy of Cornwall, which sustains him.
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