An artful game by the taxpayers" champion Few backbench MPs have more power or greater prominence than Margaret Hodge. Once the Left-wing firebrand leader of Islington council in London - so radical, indeed, that she was nicknamed "Enver" (after Enver Hoxha, the Albanian Maoist) - she successfully rebranded herself as a sharp-suited Blairite "moderniser," and was rewarded with government office. Since 2010, as chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), her regular appearances on TV and radio as the scourge of Whitehall incompetence and state wastefulness have reinforced her claim to be the independent champion of the taxpayers" interests. Yet Mrs Hodge is playing a more artful game: under her chairmanship, the PAC has been deployed as a political weapon against the Coalition's reforms of the public sector. The latest example is its report on the Government's academies programme, which it says overspent by £1 billion over a two-year period. Mrs Hodge argued that the funding system for academies had not operated effectively and was diverting money from other budgets, including those earmarked for under-performing schools. The Department for Education has questioned these findings, and asserts that the funding mechanisms criticised by the PAC were actually designed by the last government, in which Mrs Hodge served as an education minister. If anything, transparency in school funding has improved markedly under the Coalition. Most troubling is that the PAC report fails to place any of this in the context of efforts to drive up school standards, nor was any evidence taken from the academies themselves. It is, of course, the job of the PAC to hold the executive to account for the way it spends our money, and it has been very effective in the past at doing just that. Rightly, the chairman is always a senior Opposition MP; yet no suspicion attached to Mrs Hodge's two immediate predecessors, David Davis and Edward Leigh, that they were using the post as a bully pulpit to advance a political agenda. Perhaps it is a coincidence that much of the PAC's criticism dovetails with the official Labour position on many issues; but it certainly provides the Opposition with plenty of ammunition to attack the Government's reform programme. Listening to Mrs Hodge, you might think that the academies are a failure rather than the success they are proving to be. By all means, she should be vigilant in scrutinising Whitehall spending; but it would be nice to hear some occasional words of encouragement for what is, by any measure, the boldest attempt in decades to improve standards in our public services.