Making the bankers pay would be a REAL bonus

Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester’s £780,000 bonus is surely an insult to all of us. We own 81 per cent of the shares, and had to pay a £390 million fine for the bank’s global interest-rate rigging.

A justification I heard yesterday was that Hester hadn’t had enough bonuses.

‘Stephen has had only one bonus out of four years, which we think is already quite a severe level of clawback through a different route,’ explained RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton to the Sunday Times.

Not enough bonuses: Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester will pocket a bonus of almost £800,000

Clawback is the term — American in origin — which describes a government, or firm, demanding the return of money which has been dished out wrongly. For instance, huge commissions and bonuses paid for deals which turned out to be duds, losing billions for investors.

The way bankers think is this: they deserve their bonuses, and if they don’t get them, that’s a form of clawback.

How about some real clawback? RBS is reportedly ‘asking’ former directors to return the bonuses they ‘earned’ while the Libor (the rate at which banks lend to one another) was being rigged, and payment protection insurance mis-sold. So far, we are told no one has agreed to pay back their ill-gotten gains.

  More... Boss of RBS to get £800,000 bonus weeks after taxpayer-owned bank is fined £390m Libor scandal RUTH SUNDERLAND: Casino still paying out for top bankers Fred the Shred asked to voluntarily repay £6million in RBS bonuses

Hester’s bonus is for 2010, when the Libor rigging was going on.

‘It is wholly unacceptable that Hester should receive a bonus for 2010 when these scandals were still going on,’ says Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott.

The rigging itself was a ploy to boost their bonuses.

Banks are like the NHS. No one takes responsibility for bad practice and the taxpayer picks up the bill. They’re like our national health provider in another sense: governments are frightened of them.

Justification: Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, faced MPs last week about his £800,000 salary plus £250,000 housing allowance

Most of us don’t get bonuses, or share options, no matter how well we perform. Most of us are paid a fraction of the £1.2 million Hester receives. Nor do we work for companies which recklessly lent money deposited by us and had to be bailed out by the Treasury.

Yet bankers, politicians and the business world generally hailed Hester as something just short of a saint for agreeing to take over RBS when his spivvy predecessor, Fred Goodwin, retired to enjoy his enormous personal wealth and pension plan.

It was said that a knighthood — or a peerage — would be offered once his work was done to mark the gratitude of the nation.

Does Hester need a £780,000 bonus? Of course not. He’s already a wealthy man, sitting on a pot of shares due to mature in May and worth £2 million.

He seems to be receiving the bonus partly to justify the continuation of such payments in the banking community, whatever the performance of the banks.

‘We are not contemplating, for the avoidance of doubt, clawing back Stephen’s bonus award that was made in 2010,’ says Hampton.

Being owned 81 per cent by the taxpayer doesn’t appear to affect those in charge at RBS. The Government might not have encouraged this view, but Chancellor George Osborne has said nothing I am aware of to suggest otherwise.

Where can we turn for help? How about the new, Canadian-born Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney? Surely, he could get the message across — that it’s just not on for bankers underpinned by the state to ladle out bonuses to themselves.

Carney faced MPs last week and justified his £800,000 salary plus £250,000 housing allowance by saying his package was ‘the equivalent’ of that enjoyed by outgoing governor Mervyn King.

He didn’t sound like a chap to oppose the remuneration of other bankers. His background as a former Goldman Sachs executive isn’t encouraging either.

How were they described again? ‘Like a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,’ said Rolling Stone magazine.

  Refreshing: Helena Christensen subconsciously distances herself from work and will often sit in airports reading books 'to fill my brain'

Having spent 26 years as a model, Helena Christensen is showing off her new range of undergarments, remarking: ‘As a model, you are always alone with your thoughts.’

She subconsciously distances herself from work and will often sit in airports reading books ‘to fill my brain’. As many of us do while alone with our thoughts.

What a refreshingly down-to-earth person, despite being able to earn $10,000 a day!

Recycling our rubbish is an art form

Dadaism was an art movement of the early 20th century which rejected the values of the middle classes.

Rejecting reason and logic, Dadaists prized nonsense and irrationality. Is there something Dadaesque in the news that much of the household rubbish we’re compelled to sort carefully for recycling is subsequently buried in landfill?

As a report by the Mail’s Steve Doughty revealed here at the weekend, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) now admits that at best ‘some’ and in other cases ‘hardly any’ of the waste sent to them is usable.

Defra also concedes that the the advent of recycling bins is an EU ruling. The Waste Framework Directive, it says, ‘requires us to promote high-quality recycling as a way of maximising the environment benefits of recycling’.

Some of us have to sort our rubbish in ten different bags or containers. One of the most stringent local authorities, Telford and Wrekin Council, found that only 30 per cent of householders chose to recycle their kitchen and garden waste — well below the level which makes food waste collection viable.

Recycling is a good idea. What a pity the joint efforts of the EU and local councils have turned it into a joke.

  Jeremy Paxman has been missing from BBC2’s Newsnight for 53 days, partly because he is advising the incoming Director-General, Tony Hall, on who should be appointed editor of the show, according to a broadsheet news report yesterday.

But it wouldn’t take 53 days to steer Hall in the right direction. Perhaps Jeremy himself is taking over. In the U.S., it’s not unknown for anchors to  be editors.

The University Challenge quizmaster certainly has the experience. He’s been at the BBC — his only employer — for 36 years. But I suspect the truth is simpler: he’s writing another book.

  The first picture most us saw of Kate was far more suggestive than any beach bikini shot

We've seen it all before

Please, not another row about Kate being photographed in a bikini. More pictures we’re not allowed to see.

According to the Sunday People, royal officials are taking legal advice about snaps of the pregnant duchess — showing a small ‘baby bump’ — walking in the surf on the Caribbean island of Mustique with Prince William. Others depict her sister, Pippa, also in a bikini. The family Middleton is in residence. William and Kate are roosting in a £19,000-a-week villa on the island made famous by the late, rascally socialite Colin Tennant.

Shouldn’t we have a peek at them if no law was broken in taking the pictures?

The first picture most us saw of Kate was far more suggestive than any beach bikini shot. She was posing in a see-through dress while a student at St Andrews University.

Camilla Bridles at French

Loved Tom Parker Bowles’s story (in the Mail on Sunday) about his mother Camilla asking a ski instructor with whom she was sharing a chairlift: ‘Do you like horses?’ His reply: ‘Yes, with chips!’

Tom says this illustrates our very different attitude towards eating horse. Indeed so.

But authorities here raise another problem. They say horses are injected with a drug which — if ingested by humans — is dangerous.

Perhaps I’ve got it wrong, but the implication is that the drug is not used on French horses. So if the French are eating horses which come from Britain, they’re exposing themselves to health dangers.

Or, if they do use the drug, and eat horses so injected, perhaps they have become immune to the drug’s side effects.

Now we’re told the Mafia is involved in feeding horsemeat into lasagne bound for Britain.Not only must we deplore those French who happily eat horsemeat, but other Continental types who fraudulently pass it off  as beef.

I read somewhere over the weekend an essay by a fan of the EU saying he had come to the sad conclusion that we’d never accept it.

Camilla’s shock at hearing about le cheval avec frites enjoyed by her ski instructor says it all.