Ken Macdonald QC, a founding member of Cherie Blair's legal chambers, is to become the new director of public prosecutions.

Macdonald - who will swap his career at the bar where he earns up to £1 million a year, for the £145,000 post - will take over from David Calvert Smith QC.

David Davis, the shadow deputy prime minister, said: "This is becoming more and more a government of who you know rather than what you know.

"Whether or not it is intended, jobs increasingly appear to go to people who are 'one of us'."