Let's begin with a parlour game. You'll have heard much about "gold-plated" public sector pensions this week, but can you guess the discrete group of public sector employees whose pensions are not so much gold-plated, or even platinum-plated, as rhodium-plated – metaphorically clad in Earth's most precious metal? For reasons unclear, but believed to be rooted in our radioactive levels of national self-loathing, this group has not been minced by the rightwing press this week.

And so to a mere taster of their perks. Just 15 years' work could build up a pension of £24,000, a recent FT assessment noted, whereas private sector employees would have to amass £700,000 to generate the same income when they retire at 65. Taxpayers contribute three times more to this group's pensions than its members do themselves. And should they die, their spouses receive a lump sum of four times their annual salary, and an annual income of five-eighths of their pension.

Two years ago reform of this anachronistic bounty was suggested, and a year ago the senior salaries review board delivered its verdict, recommending wholesale overhaul. The three main political parties all appeared to jump on the bandwagon – yet precisely nothing has changed. Who are these lucky people, you might be wondering? Are they the feckless nurses, dedicating decades of their lives to the glamour of the wards for obscenely giddy sums of 19 grand a year, before swanning off to retirements spent wintering in Gstaad and repairing to Capri for the summer? I'm afraid they are not.

In case you are no warmer, let me offer the clue that might swing it. In recent years, fringe benefits for the rhodium-platers – all paid for by the taxpayer – have included the provision of household sundries from scatter cushions to helipads, as well as services such as swimming-pool maintenance, belltower repair and moat-cleaning.

Aha! In a sense the question was an unfair trick, what with MPs not being public service workers in any meaningful sense of the term. Indeed, if you seek a definition of "miscast", consider the minister charged with lambasting strike-threatening teachers on the airwaves. Almost any of them would have been as absurd, admittedly; but for the record, the task fell to the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude. Francis Maude! The chap who claimed £35,000 in two years for mortgage interest payments on a London flat – complete with 24-hour concierge and gym – when he owned a house one minute's walk away. He also boasts a house in the country and one in France. Yet this week Francis was branding teachers irresponsible, causing some to nod pliantly in agreement, as though the spectacle of such a man having anything to say about teachers other than "thank you very much" was not so wholly preposterous as to be savagely, screamingly funny.

What an utterly defeated lot we are. Wherever did it go, that explosion of national anger over MPs' expenses? It already seems like a midsummer night's dream that happened to another country.

As for an overhaul of MPs' pensions, that policy appears to have gone down over Westminster's Bermuda triangle. Tories and Lib Dems have managed to agree on the most extraordinarily radical and draconian strategies that were in neither of their manifestos, yet both have gone absolutely silent on an almost insultingly simple-to-implement little policy on which each side professed to agree well before their shotgun wedding. Surely MPs should be the very first public sector employees to have their ludicrous pensions reformed – an initiative that might say "We're all in this together" rather more eloquently than George Osborne et al have thus far managed?

But then, as usual we're run by a government composed of personnel who thought nothing of drawing a full salary for what you'd hope was the faintly important job of representing their electorate, while moonlighting far more lucratively for private firms. Without speaking to every one of the care home workers whose retirement grand tours and Bahamian second homes are threatened by the pension changes, I cannot be sure how many of them combine their day jobs with sitting as non-executive directors on the boards of banks and technology firms, as Francis Maude did for hundreds of pounds an hour until just before the election. But instinct suggests it would be a ballpark 0%.

I'm afraid this is why, as a taxpayer, I'd far rather my money went towards funding the pensions of five thousand transgender binmen Christmas party liaison officers than a single MP slithering round the Palace of Westminster working out how to combine shilling for a defence contractor with gaming the John Lewis list for a Waterford crystal grapefruit bowl and a fully funded mortgage on either their own second home or that of their ducks. At least the liaison officers restrict themselves to one job.

Indeed, it feels apposite to note that Belgium has this week notched up a full year without a government, and seems no less civilised for it than our own dysfunctional land. Perhaps the time has come to ask what MPs are, if not these non-essential public sector jobs about which we hear so very much?