Bob Diamond’s face is a lot less unacceptable than Gordon Brown’s

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

Bob Diamond, the generously remunerated American president of Barclays, has been put through his paces so often in this column that we really ought to give him his own treadmill in the Any Other Business penthouse gym. But I make no apology for mentioning him again — and this time, instead of making him my comedy stooge, I’m going to stand up for him. He came under attack last week from both George Osborne (‘It really beggars belief that two years after we all bailed them out, we get the Barclays bank chief paying himself £63 million’) and Lord Mandelson (‘If you look at Bob Diamond, who took £63 million in pay — that to me is the unacceptable face of banking. He hasn’t earned that money…’). Barclays described the figure of £63 million as ‘a wilful distortion’, while the Guardian conjured a figure somewhere near £60 million, apparently by adding together everything Bob has earned in performance-related pay schemes dating from 2004, everything he might earn between now and 2013, and the £27 million he took from the sale of his shares in Barclays’ asset management arm.

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Well, here’s the thing: the precise numbers in this argument really don’t matter, because every reasonable person outside the City recognises Diamond and his ilk are paid far more than they merit for what they do, even when they do it well — and that, perversely, the more they expect to be paid, the greater the danger they will eventually provoke another financial catastrophe.