Dominic Lawson: There is something sinister in the way that the Auditor General is now being vilified

For connoisseurs of hypocrisy this was the most exquisite morsel: Sir John Bourn, the head of the body charged by Parliament to root out the waste of public funds, has been exposed as a freeloader on an epic scale. This, at least, is what newspapers have been saying - at considerable length - for the past few days.

Their apparent outrage stems from a story first published in the latest edition of Private Eye. The magazine, using the same Freedom of Information Act which MPs wish to block from examining their own expenses, has forced into the open the fact that Sir John Bourn had racked up 43 foreign trips over the past three years, all at the taxpayers' expense. On 22 of these trips the head of the National Audit Office was accompanied by his wife, Ardita. She, it is claimed, was responsible for £76,000 of the total travel expenses involved of £336,000. Employing the language more typically used by the red-top press, Private Eye lambasted the "jaunts for the pampered pair", and their alleged predilections for "palatial establishments... in the swankiest part of town", eating at "top restaurants", not to mention Lady Bourn's "shopping while hubby is in meetings". Cor!

Not surprisingly, the National Audit Office has energetically defended its 73-year-old boss, insisting that all the trips were on NAO business and that "our international work is very important, bringing in £4m a year for the Treasury".

It also claimed that "Lady Bourn attends where necessary to meet the expectations of the host in line with established practice in the diplomatic service". You might or might not buy that, but surely the most interesting question remaining is: how and why did this story emerge?

Private Eye is the publication where those with grudges go to settle their scores, usually when the object of revenge is their own boss. On that basis, we might assume that some official in the National Audit Office who dislikes Sir John - or possibly Lady Bourn - suggested to a Private Eye hack that it might be interesting to put in a Freedom of Information request about the extent and cost of the NAO chief's foreign trips. The one explanation I don't buy is that it spontaneously occurred to someone at Private Eye to make such an obscure request.

There are other possible explanations, less banal in their implications than the machinations of a disaffected NAO employee. After all, since he took up his post as long ago as 1988 Sir John Bourn must have accumulated a lot of enemies: he has always been nothing less than blunt in his criticism of departments of state which have been guilty of waste. Most spectacularly of all, last July he gave an interview to Liam Halligan of the Sunday Telegraph which amounted to a full-blooded onslaught on Gordon Brown's pet project, tax credits.

Sir John described the Chancellor's most precious policy as "a failure" and described the means testing involved as "a terrible waste of resources ... ridiculous". For good measure he said that the £23bn Treasury-backed debts of Network Rail should be on the Government's books, which would have the effect of smashing Chancellor Brown's "golden rule"; and he said that the sort of independence Brown had promised for the Office of National Statistics "could never be believed - one would always be looking for Treasury levers under the table".

I was not surprised, shortly after the publication of that extraordinary onslaught, to see the odd disobliging story appear about Sir John Bourn. The tight-knit little band of brothers around Gordon Brown is almost feral in its attacks on anyone who dares to challenge the supremacy of the clan chieftain.

The most spectacular example occurred when Tony Blair was rash enough to ask Alan Milburn to take charge of the 2005 general election campaign. Gordon Brown's coterie launched their own internecine campaign - codename Kill Mil - as a result of which grateful political correspondents were deluged with information, some of it in the form of documents, highly critical of Mr Milburn's competence and character. It did for him.

Apparently a similar political and personal assassination was lying in wait for David Miliband were he to have decided to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party. It was presumably fear of this which lay behind Margaret Beckett's plea to the boy David to stand aside and not become "a human sacrifice".

It's fair to say that Gordon Brown has not personally got involved in such tactics. Just as Alastair Campbell did the dirty work while Tony Blair maintained his reputation as a man without malice, so the Chancellor's own fingerprints can never be detected on any knife that has been found between a dead enemy's shoulder blades.

This process has been most amusingly played out during the last stages of the Labour Party leadership "contest". When it appeared that John McDonnell might succeed in getting enough votes to mount a formal challenge, Gordon Brown announced that he would welcome such a contest. One could scarcely hear the Chancellor's generous words above the din of arms being broken as left-wing Labour MPs were being persuaded not to vote for McDonnell.

None of this should be taken as a scintilla of evidence that the Chancellor or his henchmen are behind the exposure of Sir John Bourn's travel arrangements. As far as I can ascertain, the NAO itself doesn't believe that this was a retaliation for its boss's onslaught on the Chancellor's own financial extravagance - and in any case there are far too many conspiracy theories going around which are based simply on the lazy assumption that motive amounts to guilt.

So I suspect we shall just have to regard it as the purest coincidence that the revelations about Sir John and Lady Bourn's "jaunts" emerged during the week in which it was also revealed that the Government would have to write off as irrecoverable no less than £5bn which had been misallocated as tax credits, as a result either of official incompetence or private fraud.

A fortnight ago the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons declared that in total, £6bn had been paid out incorrectly, with fraud accounting for a further £1.3bn. Yet this official report, truly scandalous in its implications and involving sums of money equivalent to Britain's entire annual foreign aid budget, has attracted less press attention than Sir John Bourn's allegedly excessive travel expenses of £336,000.

I realise that stories involving "personalities" have a particular traction in the modern media, but even so, this particular discrepancy exhibits a sense of priorities which shows something close to contempt for the public interest, while purporting to be acting in its defence.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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