Are Cameron and Osborne laughing at our stupidity?

Here’s our great leader, multi-millionaire David Cameron, with his best chum, our great chancellor George Osborne, heir to the Osborne baronetcy�of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary�and Ballylemon in County Waterford:

They seem to be very happy men. Well, so would you and I be if we, like them, had been born with a lorry-load of silver spoons in our mouths and we had their many millions.

But there may be another reason Cameron and Osborne are laughing. They may be laughing at our gullibility and stupidity. Because, while Cameron and Osborne have been telling the rest of us to tighten our belts and have preached fiscal responsibility �to get the public finances back on track� , they’ve been spending ever more of our money on the Cabinet Office, the department supposedly responsible for cutting public spending. For us it may be frugality and cuts, but for Cameron’s and Osborne’s civil service, it’s been spend spend spend.

Just in case you didn’t know what the Cabinet Office does, here’s an explanation from their own annual report: “Within any great organisation is a strong and vibrant centre and at the heart of the UK Civil Service � often described as the best in the world � is the Cabinet Office. At the core of Government, the Cabinet Office is leading the way in ensuring that the Civil Service continues to be the very best by creating a modern organisation for the modern world”.

In the full year before Cameron and Osborne came to power, the Cabinet Office’s staff cost us an eye-watering �146m. By 2011-12, staff costs had shot up by �18m to �164m. And then two years later, by 2013-14, staff costs jumped again by another �6m to �170m:

Just in the last full financial year, the number of staff at the Cabinet Office increased from an incredible 2,040 useless over-paid, over-pensioned pen-pushers to 2,327 useless over-paid, over-pensioned pen-pushers.

No wonder Cameron and Osborne are laughing. They get away with spending ever more of our money on their own bureaucratic empires while lecturing the rest of us about thrift and cutbacks.