Do we need a £2.4 million calibre man?

I kid you not, the chairman of the Royal Mail Group, Donald Brydon, who presumably comes from a galaxy far away, has the brass neck to tell us that the £2.4 million pay packet for Adam "Axe man" Crozier in his final year administering euthanasia to the postal services was necessary to attract the right calibre of executive to run the operation.

At this point he might have added "into the ground". I don't remember in the good old days of the GPO that the bloke in charge had to be given a lottery win every year to get out of bed each day.

There must be a fairly long queue of more than competent people who could make a fair fist of running Royal Mail as a public service - public and service being words not in Crozier's vocabulary. We might even get post offices remaining open, early morning and second deliveries, regular collections and the like. In short the sort of things you might expect from a civilised, publicly owned and funded postal service. Service being the operative word.

We have had this having to pay obscene amounts to attract the right suit cobblers ever since public utilities were privatised and the Government thought it was a good idea (Government and good idea do not fit easily in any sentence) to run public bodies as quasi plcs.

Produce a trough and snouts and, in many cases, front feet are in there before you can say bonus. Strangely in most cases it was the people who were already running these operations who found their wages suddenly having to be delivered by Securicor.

I could never work out, if they were doing the job at what was still a pretty good salary, and no one was trying to head hunt them before the public bodies were privatised or given commercial freedom, why they needed to be paid a king's ransom to keep them afterwards. They had no where else to go.

Cameron has a job on his hands if he wants to control it now though. There is a whole new class of civil servants who are screwing the taxpayers for millions with ridiculous salaries and spurious bonuses based on targets they set themselves. Quite a few make bankers look almost restrained.

Perhaps a pay scale with a sensible ceiling would be a start and the only bonus available should be the same as that offered to most of the population - if you do your job properly then your employment will continue.