It is not often that a political figure says something that is both completely wrong and spot on at the same time. So one has to hand it to Lord Heseltine for doing just that.

In his interview with The Times yesterday, he berated his own Conservative Party for talking about the public sector as “a bloated, badly run, inefficient impost on the taxpayers’ back”.

The elder statesman of the party first managed to accuse it of doing something it doesn’t — but which it should. Then he dismissed as a baseless caricature a view of the public sector that is wholly accurate. Quite a feat.

About the only firm policy announcement made by David Cameron has been to commit the party to unending support for the NHS. The Conservative Party simply does not refer to the public sector in hostile tones. Would that it did.

Lord Heseltine’s description of the public sector is, unwittingly, one of the most accurate and succinct imaginable. It is indeed bloated, badly run and an inefficient impost on the taxpayer’s back. Yesterday’s revelation, for instance, that some GPs are earning £250,000 a year is typical. It may be that in a market, where the public can choose how and with whom its money is spent, GPs would earn similar sums. But because of the way the system is structured, we will never know. Under the existing system GPs are handed taxpayers’ money not because of any increased efficiency or success in proving their worth but because the British Medical Association knows how to work the system and has stiffed the Department of Health in negotiating their contract.

The story is true across the public sector, a beast that the Chancellor has fed like a goose being stuffed for foie gras. Public spending now consumes 42 per cent of GDP, up from 37.4 per cent in 1999-2000. Much of that money has gone on the NHS. And much of that, as we have seen, has gone on arbitrary increases in salaries.

If that money was being well spent, or was being allocated to salaries as a result of consumers’ own decisions, it might not matter. But the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that NHS productivity fell just when the extra money was being taken from taxpayers and spent for them by the Chancellor. Indeed, a leaked internal report by the Treasury and Downing Street Strategy Unit found that public-sector productivity fell by 10 per cent between 1997 and 2003.

Lord Heseltine’s description of the public sector is pinpoint accurate. But too few, not too many, Conservatives point out what is happening. The Cameroonians’ desperation to show that Conservatives do not pull the legs off ladybirds for fun means that that they are starting to confuse looking like normal human beings with taking part in a me-too embrace of a dangerously high tax burden and an inefficient public sector. It looks as if we will have to get used to Browneronism, the 21st-century’s version of Butskellism, for the next decade at least.

It is no wonder that the leitmotif of Lord Heseltine’s career has been his Eurofanaticism, since his embrace of public sector corporatism is of a piece with his fellow Europhiliacs.

President Chirac’s capitulation over the modest proposed reforms in labour law has been much commented on, but French leaders’ cowardice in the face of difficulty is hardly novel. Even when they do decide to proceed with reforms, they are usually a waste of time. In 2004 President Chirac and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, promised to reduce the bloated state bureaucracy — more than a quarter of all French employees are in one of the three fonctions publiques. Yet the 2005 figure for job cuts in central government was just 6,847, which was dwarfed by new hirings by local government.

It would be wrong to point only to France. Gordon Brown’s trumpeted “Gershon review” job reductions do nothing more, if they even exist, than reduce the level of growth of public sector jobs.

Most of Europe is in the grip of public-sector bloat. This matters for many reasons, but not least because demographic changes within the EU make it unsustainable and threaten to bring the whole edifice tumbling down.

By 2020 a fifth of the EU population will be aged over 60, compared with around 15 per cent in 2005. Older people are, under present welfare structures, a financial burden on the community, requiring greater medical attention and thus imposing greater costs on national governments.

According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, the percentage of gross national product spent on long-term care can be expected to rise from 1.8 per cent in 1995 to 5 per cent in 2031. To put this in context, the NHS now consumes 6 per cent of gross national product in the UK. We face the prospect of an increasingly heavy tax burden on every new generation of workers, at a time when the proportion of jobs in the public sector, which produces no wealth and exists only on the back of taxes raised from the private sector, is growing.

The EU’s failure to implement even part of the Lisbon agenda — a series of liberalising measures to make Europe more competitive — shows how bleak the prospects are. Romano Prodi, in his former incarnation as President of the Commission, remarked on leaving office that “Lisbon is a big failure”. The failure was his, as it will be Italy’s under him as Prime Minister.

The European Central Bank’s analysis of public sector efficiency in 23 industrialised countries demonstrates clearly that the smaller the public sector, the greater its efficiency. The better we want the public sector to perform, in other words, the less we should expand it. Its tasks should be limited.

Lord Heseltine’s asinine remarks are a woeful symptom of the cause of today’s problems.