How wonderful then to be a civil servant, when failure is rewarded with a nice fat bonus.

Hard-up taxpayers struggling to make ends meet will be astonished that the Government is handing out £128million in Civil Service bonuses after a year in which the penpushers’ performance reached new depths of incompetence.

Take HM Revenue and Customs, which managed to lose the confidential child benefit records of 25million families. Bonus: £19million.

Then there’s the Child Support Agency, which is such a pathetic failure that it’s being scrapped. Bonus: £3.7million.

Finally there’s the Ministry of Defence, which lost 69 laptops and seven PCs last year. One laptop contained details of 600,000 people. Bonus: £41million.

All those millions of pounds they’re handing out are yours, don’t forget. While you battle to pay the mortgage, fill the tank and pay for the shopping, civil servants are picking up an average £7,000 bonus – enough for a foreign holiday and the deposit on a new car.

Nice work if you can get it – maybe it’s time poor mugs like us taxpayers applied. Don’t worry if you’re not up to the job, you’ll probably get promoted. Plus bonus, of course.