Unpaid internships turned me into a banker – but I still think they’re a good thing

My thanks to ‘AndyB’, the only reader who posted an online comment on my column last week. It was ‘Don’t you ever go on holiday?’ and the answer is yes I do, and here I am deep in the Dordogne, glass of rosé to hand, lunch on the terrace in prospect, scanning cyberspace for some fizzing ingredients to make an Any Other Business cocktail. Upbeat economic news from home, led by ‘CBI lifts growth forecast amid optimism’, merely adds to the mellowness of mood. As for local issues to raise the pulse, there isn’t even a decent ruckus to be had over shale gas, since François Hollande has barred all exploration of it beneath French soil. ‘Non au Gaz de Schiste’ declare some rather redundant banners, on which I’m tempted to spray ‘Vas te faire fracker, Monsieur le President’ in the hope of getting myself arrested so I could write about French police brutality.

But instead let me turn to the topic that has had so many Spectator readers in a froth this week: the merits or iniquities of unpaid internships. Brendan O’Neill’s essay describing interns who agitate to be paid as ‘nauseating’ in their sense of entitlement attracted no less than 114 online comments, many of them very cross indeed. That certainly puts my lonesome message from AndyB in the shade, and tells me I’d better jump on this bandwagon before our younger readership assumes I’m permanently out to lunch on the terrace. So, kids, here’s a horror story to cap any of yours: unpaid internships turned me into a banker.