Whitehall’s billions

Two weeks ago Justine Greening was demoted for the offence of sticking to the Conservative manifesto on which she was elected and refusing to back down over the proposal for a third runway at Heathrow. This week she has shown that she is far from being demoralised by the experience; in fact, it might turn out to be the making of her. She has grasped in a fortnight what seemed to evade Andrew Mitchell, her predecessor at the Department for International Development (DfID), for two-and-a-half years. She has taken the trouble to examine her department’s swollen budget and ask herself: is all this money really being wisely spent?

The revelation that DfID paid out £500 million in consultants’ fees last year should come as no surprise: when a government decides to define public spending as a good in itself, fat salaries tend to result. It is as if Whitehall were doing a remake of the film Brewster’s Millions, whose protagonist is on a mission to spend $30 million in a week.