But how much is the Prime Minister paid?

You won't starve: two of our ex-PMs

TODAY is transparency day, with the new government publishing the names and details of all civil servants with salaries in excess of £150,000 per annum. More such releases of information are promised, down in fact to around £58,000. But the initial benchmark of £150k has been chosen because, we are told, it is “more than the Prime Minister earns”.

That is a particularly creative view of the remuneration of the First Lord of the Treasury. With David Cameron’s voluntary cut of 5%, his “basic” is around £142,500. But this comes nowhere near to valuing the true monetary worth of such a post.

For starters, all Prime Ministers are also MPs, a role that attracts a salary without expenses of £64,766. On the one hand, these two jobs are separate – you can be an MP without being a Prime Minister. But on the other, they are linked – you can’t (in the modern era) be a Prime Minister without being an MP. So we need to make a judgement about whether this £64k should be included in any assessment of the PM’s package.

Second is the very considerable value gleaned in rent and accommodation costs that comes with the job. The taxpayer not only puts the Prime Minister up at Number 10 for the duration of his tenure, but also maintains the far-from-shoddy Chequers retreat on his or her behalf. It is almost impossible to estimate the true monetary worth of exclusive, cost-free access to two of the UK’s most desirable properties, but it is a massive perk that adds tens or even hundreds of thousands to the overall package, and which is not available to any of the public servants to whom the government is now comparing salaries.

Then there is the pension scheme. All Prime Ministers are entitled to an ex-officio pension for which there is no minimum qualifying period, to which no contributions are payable and which amounts to one half of the annual salary payable at the time of departure from office. This is uprated annually in line with the Retail Price Index. Can anyone find an employer anywhere that will compare to the sheer largesse of this scheme? Even the relatively generous Civil Service scheme looks stingy by comparison.

But, of course, even these extremely generous terms pale next to the earnings power all former PMs can command, from books to lectures, to non-executive directorships and so on. The same may be true for former senior civil servants, but at a small fraction of the overall value.

The government has been careful to compare basic salaries of the PM and the civil servants in question. A fairer comparison would be the overall package, excluding estimates of future earnings. On that basis, there probably isn’t a public servant in the land that can come anywhere near the overall “rem” of the PM.