The figures are now in, and they confirm what any sensible person already suspected.
Under a Labour government obsessed with its own self-congratulation, the bureaucratic apparatus is simply getting fatter.
We learn, without any great shock, that the number of civil servants deemed worthy of a six-figure salary has absolutely soared since Sir Keir Starmer took up residence in Downing Street.
The increase is not a modest adjustment, but a jump of almost 20 per cent in just a single year.
Specifically, the Whitehall elite earning £100,000 or more ballooned from 2,810 to a staggering 3,350 in the middle of this year, a tidy 19.2 per cent inflation of the public payroll.
This isn't merely a spreading of the wealth. It is a stratospheric rise at the very top.
Consider the core group on £150,000+, that cohort has seen a truly astonishing 38 per cent increase, rising from 290 to 400 individuals now commanding salaries that should, by any measure, signify exceptional, world-class performance.
To cap off this spectacle of administrative self regard, there are now approximately 40 officials sitting comfortably on more than £200,000+ a year.
This, of course, is a sum well in excess of the £165,000 that the Prime Minister himself takes home.
One is left to wonder what crisis of national competence or what dazzling feat of administrative efficiency could possibly justify such a profound and rapid explosion in top-tier remuneration.
Perhaps this is simply the cost of doing business in a culture where rewarding failure is rapidly becoming the most cherished principle of governance.
The Taxpayers Alliance called the figures a "slap in the face to hard-pressed taxpayers", claiming they show the Civil Service is "completely detached from the reality faced by those footing the bill".
Where is the restraint?
The current Labour administration, led by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, pledged to "cut costs."
Instead, we find the pay bill soaring.
As Alex Burghart, the Shadow Cabinet Office minister, points out with justified exasperation, "At a time when the public finances are being systematically broken, the very least one might expect is a show of self control".
Of course, restraint is not a characteristic one readily associates with the modern state.
The priorities remain perfectly inverted. A focus not on driving efficiency, cutting waste, and living within our means, but on the endless, self congratulatory inflation of the overall pay bill.
The Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence, which both boast a disproportionate share of the £200,000 plus club.
Yet, despite this carnival of public spending, the government finds itself unable to reveal the individual packages of these gilded few.
A perfect symbol of the lack of transparency that shrouds the entire affair.
The most recent accounts give us glimpses, the former Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, pulling in a cool £220,000.
The MOD's former Chief of the General Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, claiming £300,000 before sailing off into the sunset.
The Cabinet Office offers its usual bland, anaemic defence, a promise to be "more agile and productive" and to achieve a 16 per cent reduction in administrative costs sometime in the misty future of 2030.
It is a boilerplate answer designed to deflect, not to reassure.
The message is clear and brutal.
If Rachel Reeves is genuinely serious about fiscal responsibility in her upcoming Budget, she should cease the rhetorical games and, as the pressure groups correctly demand, take the axe to these "inflated pay packets" now.
Until then, the taxpayer remains little more than an ATM for a bureaucratic class intent on its own perpetual, self-serving elevation.
Pay must always be justified, and deliver full value for money for the taxpayer.
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