THE lavish salaries paid to leading BBC presenters, including Jonathan Ross and Terry Wogan, provoked an extraordinary intervention by the Government in the Corporation’s affairs last night.

Tessa Jowell said that the Corporation must avoid fuelling inflation in the broadcasting industry when it considers deals for its biggest draws.

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was speaking after a series of embarrassing leaks betrayed details of the salaries paid to some of the Corporation’s presenters.

Ross, who earns more than £530,000 a year for his show on Radio 2, is rumoured to be the subject of a £12.5 million offer to continue hosting television shows on the BBC.

Jeremy Paxman is reported to earn more than £1 million a year for fronting Newsnight and University Challenge; Wogan takes home £800,000 for his Radio 2 breakfast show and Chris Moyles, the “saviour of Radio 1”, is paid £630,000.

Scotland Yard has offered to help with an internal inquiry to find the source of the leak, who is believed to be a disgruntled former employee.

Ms Jowell, who was speaking before the House of Lords select committee on the BBC’s charter review, said that the large sums paid to creatives and performers by the Corporation may have knock-on effects for other broadcasters.

“One of the questions I think we need to interrogate is the extent to which the costs of other broadcasters are led by the costs of the BBC,” she said. Pressed by peers as to whether pay was part of the market that could be skewed by BBC costs, she said: “Of course it is”, but she stressed that it was “categorically not for me to set BBC salaries”.

Ms Jowell told the BBC not to expect its demands for an inflation-busting rise in the licence fee to be met. The Corporation has asked for it to go up by 2.35 per cent above the rate of inflation each year for seven years — to £180 by 2013.

“I would certainly expect the figure to be lower than the BBC proposed,” she said.

The Government intends to write into the BBC’s new ten-year royal charter a requirement that it must not compete with commercial channels in a bidding war for Hollywood films. Ministers may now be forced to consider drawing up similar rules to prevent the BBC paying inflationary salaries for entertainment talent.

The BBC has suffered a backlash from licence fee-payers after the revelations about its presenters’ salaries. Radio listeners have accused several of the best-paid of failing to offer value for money in debates via the message boards on the BBC’s website. One asked why Wogan earned more than four times the £194,000 salary of his Radio 2 colleague, Ken Bruce.

Analysis by The Times suggested, however, that Wogan represented good value, costing only 10p per listener because of his audience of 8 million. The real offender appears to be Chris Evans, whose £540,000 fee for 3.4 million listeners represents 36p per listener.

The secretive Corporation has regularly refused to divulge the salaries of its biggest names through Freedom of Information requests, but has not denied the leaked figures.

The revelations may have already triggered a wave of “talent inflation”, with a bidding war flaring around Jonathan Ross. Speculation is rife that the BBC is offering him a £12.5 million three-year deal to continue hosting his Friday night chatshow, Film 2006 and his Hollywood Greats series. His quick wit and loud suits have made him a national institution since he burst into the national consciousness as a chatshow host in the 1980s. Now, with ITV and Channel 4 courting him, he seems certain to become the highest paid presenter in British TV history.