Any other business: Capping Hester’s bonus is far more important than stripping Goodwin’s knighthood

‘Always frightfully keen on the money,’ mutters a City grandee who watched Stephen Hester build his career at Credit Suisse, Abbey and British Land before taking over the helm of the sinking Royal Bank of Scotland from Sir Fred Goodwin. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong (let’s remember) in wanting to prosper alongside your shareholders. But as I wrote in July 2009, hiring a troubleshooter for RBS whose first instinct was to negotiate his own £1.2 million salary and £6 ­million share package was a missed opportunity ‘to set a public benchmark for more moderate City pay scales, which most of us believe are essential to long-term stability in the financial sector’. Now he’s said to be resisting pressure to waive a £1 million share bonus, and it’s clearly far too late to revert to my proposal that he should be paid a public servant’s salary of £212,500 a year — the sum Goodwin reluctantly surrendered from his giant pension — plus a gong at the end if he’s done a good job.