THE National Audit Office decision to support George Osborne’s assertion that selling the government interest in Eurostar for £757.1 million represents taxpayer value makes the case for an urgent inquiry into the NAO.

Eurostar has presented two contrasting approaches in how it should be run — British on the one hand and French and Belgian on the other — since its inception.

While successive French and Belgian governments, both conservative and social democratic, have backed public efficiency through the nationally owned SNCF and SNCB rail networks, Britain has opted for private-sector short-termism.

No French or Belgian politician worth their salt would stake their reputation on the crackpot idea of selling the SNCF or SNCB shares at such a knockdown price — or any price.

Flogging off the British government end of the business to the Canadian-led Patina Rail consortium is dictated by the Chancellor’s madcap scheme to “deal with our debts and eliminate the deficit” during this Parliament.

Osborne’s strategy to do this impossible task involves slashing public services, selling every publicly owned asset for whatever he can get and then patting himself on the back in celebration of his own genius.

Commons public accounts committee chairwoman Meg Hillier may be correct — referencing late Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan’s description of Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation splurge as selling the family silver — to point out: “Once sold, the family silver can’t be bought back.”

The Chancellor boasts that he received as much as the market could bear for Eurostar, just as he and his Liberal Democrat allies said of the criminally undersold Royal Mail.

They could not wait to transfer the profitable East Coast main line railway service to the privateers and are gearing up to return the publicly salvaged RBS bank to greedy City slickers.

Osborne claims that the cash handed over by Patina was up to double what could have been expected and NAO backs him up.

If that is so, Patina must have overpaid to such an extent as to make the argument for its financial advisers to submit themselves for an urgent medical check-up.

But it is precisely not the case. The major player in Patina is Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, Canada’s second-largest pension fund, which manages several public-sector pension plans and insurance schemes in Quebec.

Its brief is to seek long-term stable investments to pay pensions to Quebecois workers and, as Hillier explains, that prospectus sums up Eurostar.

Holding on to its share would have enabled the government to pay off £500 million of national debt in the next decade and its preference share would have brought in a further £243m.

That is fully understood by both the French and Belgian governments, which is why they retain their Eurostar shares.

Osborne should not be allowed to get away with efforts to con British taxpayers into believing that he has done well by them.

The Exchequer has thrown public cash to the tune of £3 billion at Eurostar ever since the London & Continental Railways private consortium went cap in hand to Gordon Brown in 1998.

It should never have been privatised, but the major parliamentary parties have shared a neoliberal consensus that government has no role in the economy other than to transfer public finance to the private sector to assist its profit-maximising activities.

That’s why railways in Britain are more expensive than the rest of Europe, state subsidies are higher than when our rail system was publicly owned and why the directors and major shareholders of private train-operating companies are laughing all the way to the bank.