Eric 'Press Release' Pickles and his hapless sidekick Grant Shapps are fond of putting out press releases lambasting highly paid chief executives, usually (obviously) in the public sector, where they have an vested interest in keeping the tabloid monster fed and angry and providing top cover for their low-level strafing runs on the public services. Today, however, they appear to be branching out in a direction I confess I hadn't seen coming. LGC, as ever, are on the case:

Communities secretary Eric Pickles’ claim that local government chief executives’ pay had risen by 78% is actually based on a figure for FTSE 250 bosses, it has emerged.

Apparently [PDF] the figure for local government was actually 37%, and Pickles appears at first sight to have goofed up again.  Let's just examine that report in full to try and judge whether the misquotation was stupidity or malice:

Basic salary levels for ST&CC chief executives have increased by 34 per cent between 2003/04 and 2007/08. This is above the level of their counterparts in organisations such as universities, hospital trusts and registered social landlords. It is also a significantly higher increase than in the basic pay of private sector chief executives (16 per cent)I. However, direct comparisons can be misleading because the roles and remuneration packages vary greatly between organisations. For example, the additional (performance-related) pay of private sector chief executives has almost doubled so their total pay has increased by 78 per cent from 2002/03 to 2006/07.

This is actually quite hard to misread, unless you hadn't read the report in the first place, yet somehow the DCLG's top brass completely missed this prior to strapping the weapons onto the boss and catapulting him off in the direction of Radio 4.

What the Conservatives would have said about a Labour (or <insert general left winger>) figure complaining about high pay in the private sector is probably obvious - 'anti-wealth', 'politics of envy' - 'need to attract the best' - the same arguments used against the 50% tax rate by Boris Johnson and the other shills.  Sending the boss onto Today to make the point that executive pay in the private sector has shot up while the poor bastards doing the work see a reduction in living standards is either the best bit of Marxist entryism in years or a cock up of John Holmes proportions.  Unfortunately for Pickles' SpAds, it's probably the latter.

Now, LGC will be loving this - their recent run-in with the DCLG centered on the quality of data released by that department, for which Pickles, Shapps and their SpAds (whom one increasingly suspects are at least partly responsible for the shambolic goings on and need watching*) tried to blame LGC chief reporter Allister Hayman.  This one might be harder to cover up - people tend to notice if you cock up on Today and the subsequent DCLG reverse ferret was painfully obvious:

The Department for Communities and Local Government to confirmed to me they had made an error ("A couple of words got cut out"), and corrected the press release online (though there is no admission anywhere on that page that an error had been made, or the page updated - how's that for transparency?)

What does this tell us, then?  Well, Pickles and Shapps apparently employ incompetents at the public expense and between them run the department as if it were a branch of the Taxpayer's Alliance rather than an instrument of government, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.  It's also clearly a major boost for LGC (who have helpfully transcribed the interview), whose defence in the Hayman case that they were only going along with DCLG figures and can't reasonably be blamed if they're unreliable is again shown to have something of a basis in fact.  Something is rotten in the Pickles Empire, and Whitehall departments are like fish; they rot from the head down; the Hoon era MOD springs to mind, or the Home Office under a succession of authoritarian bastards from Michael Howard to Charles Clarke.

Finally, and something likely to be overlooked here, there's a political point that needs addressing by all sides - I bet the relative pay increase league table looks like this:

  1. Private sector bosses - 78%
  2. Public sector bosses - 37%
  3. The rest of us - not very much %

As the DCLG might have found if they'd read the Audit Commission report properly:

In absolute terms, ST&CC chief executives are better paid than their counterparts in a number of other local public sector institutions, with a median salary of £150,000 in 2007/08. However, they are paid less than university vice chancellors, and significantly less than chief executives in the private sector, where basic salaries are around £400,000, with bonuses of a further £586,000

It's nice of Comrade Pickles to draw our attention to the outrageous wages paid to the private sector fat cats.  Eat the rich, eh, Eric?  I'll look forward to the revolution, if only because Pickles will be very useful when it comes to building barricades.  You could stop a tank brigade with that.

* For information and research purposes, they are called Sheriden Westlake and Giles Kenningham.  I'm going to get very interested in them very soon.