Despicable Maude

Not content with imposing a semi-permanent pay freeze on civil servants and axing thousands of their jobs he now wants to set up a grading system to isolate and sack those he describes as performing poorly.

Perhaps this privately educated son of a Tory Cabinet minister, who has had everything handed to him on a plate, ought to look in the mirror before he sets up procedures to dump other people on the dole.

Hypocrisy comes easily to this product of inherited wealth, exemplified by the revelation that he drew £100,000 as director of a financial services group that profited from sub-prime mortgages even as he belatedly criticised bankers for irresponsible lending.

While the Tories were in opposition, this former Morgan Stanley director combined his shadow cabinet job with a number of non-executive directorships that pulled down £68,600 so he didn't have to depend on the pittance paid for doing his full-time post as an MP.

One such directorship - from Barclays - paid him £36,700 for six days a year, which might help to explain why he and his Tory chums have always been reluctant to clamp down on banking industry excesses.

Multimillionaire Maude was also able to use his personal riches to play the parliamentary expenses game to his own advantage.

After the Fees Office rejected his application to have the taxpayer stump up for the mortgage on his family pile in Sussex, Maude bought a flat near one of the four houses that he owned and began claiming on the new flat while renting out his house.

The Daily Telegraph estimated three years ago that Maude had benefited from about £35,000 in respect of this little wheeze - about two years salary for low-paid civil servants.

All perfectly above board and in line with the generous arrangements that property-owning MPs have approved to feather their own nests.

Maude may wonder whether he is really the person to lecture others on competent fulfilment of their duties, given that he was the minister who made the hare-brained suggestion that motorists should prepared to undermine a possible tanker drivers' dispute by keeping jerry cans full of petrol at home.

He ought to have resigned in shame when Labour peer Toby Harris urged him to do so after a woman following his advice was badly burned in her kitchen.

But the Tories accept no responsibility for the consequences of their words or actions.

As Labour MP Dennis Skinner pointed out with regard to the "resignation" of Jeremy Hunt's adviser Adam Smith over the BSkyB scandal, "when posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants."

And posh boy Maude is intent on sacking as many of the servants as he can, insisting that he will impose "private-sector-style" grading of staff to make it easier to drive some out.

His intention is to harness fear as a weapon to set worker against worker and destroy solidarity.

Civil Service union PCS was correct to categorise Maude's intervention as a desperate effort to grab a headline in the wake of strike action by 200,000 of its members in protest at his government's anti-worker policies.

David Cameron's "fairness" rhetoric lies exposed as a sham when this gaffe-prone rich boy wallows in wealth while low-paid civil servants are squeezed and threatened with the boot.