£180k to help the needy? Nice work

His appointment last autumn to chair the Charity Commission for England and Wales was described by The Spectator's Fraser Nelson as the Government's "declaration of intent" in its dealings with leftish NGOs. If nothing else, Shawcross's arrival split the Commons public administration committee. Three MPs thought he was insufficiently "politically independent"; four Tories disagreed.

The writer who once described Guantanamo as "probably the best-run detention centre in the world" this week he responded to a Daily Telegraph investigation into charities by suggesting "disproportionate salaries risk bringing organisations and the wider charitable world into disrepute".

In "these difficult times", Shawcross observed, "trustees should consider whether very high salaries are really appropriate, and fair to both the donors and the taxpayers who fund charities". He made a fair point. Strangely enough, a point made four years ago by the Unite union. Neither Shawcross nor The Telegraph called that fact to mind.

Still, there was the chairman of the commission, with his 50k for two days a week, agreeing that it was a bad idea for charities such as the British Red Cross to pay its chief executive £184,000 annually, for Save the Children to grant £163,000, or for Christian Aid to pay £126,072. The news that 30 staff at the 14 charities comprising the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) were on better than £100,000 might have been calculated to disturb well-intentioned donors.

Why, though, would it strike Conservative sheets such as The Telegraph and the Daily Mail as odd, never mind outrageous? They hold it as an article of faith that the state should be rolled back, that charity and David Cameron's Big Society should take up the slack. And why pick on just these 14 charities for paying the fabled going rate, in proper free market style, to professionals given charge of big, complex organisations?

You could call the scale of the rewards offensive. I would. For the public, if not for the professionals, charity work still depends on the idea of a vocation. You don't choose the job, the job chooses you. The inducement is moral, not financial. When Dame Barbara Stocking, former chief executive of Oxfam, told the BBC she had taken a 30% pay cut from her former NHS position to run the charity for better than £100,000 a year, she was, let's say, missing the point.

In November of 2009, Unite, with 60,000 charity workers among its members, came closer to the truth. Its research showed at least 50 chief executives of organisations soliciting donations from the public had been on salaries of between £100,000 and £210,000 in the previous year.

Rachael Maskell, Unite's national officer for the sector, asserted that "City pay culture" was "seeping into the remuneration packages of charity bosses". She argued it "corrupts the ethos of the voluntary sector and is an insult to those, often on average incomes, who donate to charity". Stephen Bubb, chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, gave the same answer as he gave last week, dismissing "a cheap shot at people running serious organisations in a time of social crisis".

Responding to Shawcross, Bubb asserted these posts at big national and international charities were "very demanding jobs and we need to attract the best talent to those jobs".

That's exactly what they say, is it not, in the City and in the banks? It's the line deployed to justify me-too pay in local government, the NHS, or universities, as though the private sector's inflated sense of entitlement has any relevance. Is there much competition for "the best talent" when there is a need to aid the starving?

Nevertheless, Shawcross and The Telegraph were somewhat selective. For example, they could have called the beloved RSPCA to account. Its best-paid employee - presumably Gavin Grant, the chief executive - earned between £150,000 and £160,000 last year. Or what about England's revered National Trust? Run by Dame Helen Ghosh, its top earner in 2012 received between £170,000 and £179,000.

Shawcross did not ask aloud whether such salaries are "appropriate" or "disproportionate". Presumably, then, the problem for Shawcross is not big wages. Since the Telegraph also settled on the DEC in the knowledge that other charities were identified by Unite as paying still higher salaries, the chances are that money itself is not the problem. Overseas aid might be another matter.

Tories don't like it. They dislike the fact that David Cameron persists in spending £11.5 billion a year for the sake of influence and humanitarianism. They despise the fact that a lot of that money goes through the DEC. Since they cannot ape Ukip clowns with talk of money wasted on "bongo-bongo land", they spring the fat cat trap. Their City friends have been given a hard time. So let the bleeding hearts have a taste.

Serious points are being missed. One is that Unite got it right in 2009. At the top, the charity sector has become a closed shop for the veterans of public life. Another problem is the relationship between charities and government. Of some 164,000 charities in Britain, with 25 new bodies applying for recognition daily, perhaps 26,000 depend on state money. Oxfam had a total income of £367.9m in its last accounts. Of that, £162.1m came from "public authorities". In the case of Save the Children, the figure was £136m.

So charities become vulnerable when they indulge themselves outrageously in "difficult times" while the Tories tire of coddling desperate foreigners. The reactionaries, meanwhile, have no problem with registering their own think tanks as charities, but that's another story. Big wages and mercy missions do not mix.

The charities forget something else. Never mind Tory plots against the overseas aid budget. The gift aid "tax repayments" they received last year alone thanks to the public amounted to £1.06 billion. Restraint has a price.