Naked envy of a top civil servant Oh, the indignities of being one of Whitehall's "Sir Humphreys"" and having to accept a salary which is not too much higher than the Prime Minister's annual whack of £142,500. Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the top civil servant at the Treasury, is paid £176,000, but, when he appeared before the Public Accounts Committee the other day, he didn't seem altogether satisfied with his lot. "If I look at the relative pay between, say, the Treasury permanent secretary and the local authority chief executive of Kensington and Chelsea during my lifetime, there has been an extraordinary shift of wage levels towards local authorities," intoned Sir Nicholas, a gregarious bright spark whose money does not always seem to run to a hairbrush. When the Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris asked "how is the pay ratio between the head of the Treasury and the head of Kensington and Chelsea going at the moment?," a melancholy Sir Nicholas replied: "I obviously chose the wrong vocation. I should have become a town clerk. Strike up the violins. Still, there may be something to be said for civil servants not being in any great hurry to go over £150,000, which is when the top rate of tax kicks in. Last year, every member of the Cabinet was asked by The Daily Telegraph whether they paid the top rate and would therefore benefit from the cut from 50p to 45p. Apart from the Prime Minister, no other Cabinet minister admitted to earning enough to be caught by the top rate.