Public scandal

To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of ‘Mondeo Man’, a hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however, who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour’s six years in office. It is Principal Project Delivery Officer Person. That antihero of Chekhov, the white-collar government employee, is emerging as the hero of Blair’s Britain.

Forget the corporate fat cats supposedly draining the British economy dry through their self-rewarding of failure; it is the public sector that is enjoying the explosion in pay. Between the first quarter of 2002 and the first quarter of 2003, according to the Office of National Statistics, the average public-sector salary rose by 5 per cent, a more than healthy 2 per cent above the rate of inflation. The accelerating wealth of the nation’s outreach workers and community-development officers, however, has been at the expense of private-sector workers.