I set out my argument on the unfairness of soaring executive pay back in November, when I pointed out that ‘in all the years I’ve been writing about the socially divisive nature of this trend and the impossibility of justifying it performance terms, the fat cats have multiplied their take more than fourfold’. So I welcome the Prime Minister’s sudden interest in the subject: I hope he really intends to empower investors to do more about it, and is not just mouthing concern in order to upstage Ed Miliband on the only issue on which the failing Labour leader threatens to gain traction. But I also hope Cameron’s team will ponder my advice that the problem is not lack of transparency but an excess of it, fuelling a grotesque game of boardroom leapfrog. And they should ignore calls to put ‘workers’ representatives’ on remuneration committees, an idea which is a subversive throwback to the 1970s, recalling the notorious Bullock committee on ‘industrial democracy’ whose recommendations not even the Callaghan government was foolish enough to enact.
The chief proponent of workers’ representatives these days is the serious-sounding ‘High Pay Commission’, chaired by the former Guardian journalist Deborah Hargreaves and made up of a theologian, a trade unionist, a Lib Dem peer and a couple of fund managers. The commission describes itself as ‘independent from any political party or organisation’ and ‘non-partisan’, yet also admits to being ‘established by Compass’ — a pressure group whose slogan is ‘Direction for the Democratic Left’ and which trumpets the commission as ‘showing the left can win’. Perhaps the BBC ought to highlight that claim every time it gives Ms Hargreaves airtime.
Bisected hunt
Hats — though not hunt caps — off to Transport Secretary Justine Greening for having the courage to approve an amended version of the HS2 London-to-Birmingham high-speed rail line in the teeth of fierce opposition from affected Tory shires. ‘The changes mean that more than half the route will now be mitigated by tunnel or cutting,’ she claims, and a longer tunnel north of Amersham will I hope make the future more bearable for enclaves of angry Spectator readers in that area. But Ms Greening will still face a guerrilla campaign to maximise planning delays and drive the project’s costs beyond hope of viability — and at 32 she’s probably the only minister who might still be on the front bench when it is completed, in 2026 at the earliest.
I stick to my own view that ‘a high-speed rail network between major cities is a 21st-century essential’, and look forward to exercising my pensioner’s rail-pass on it. But I’m sorry to think that, as Melissa Kite wrote recently, the Bicester and Whaddon Chase is to be bisected — it being the first (of only two) fox hunts I ever rode with. I fell at the second gate, my horse bolted, and I spent the rest of the day in the terrierman’s van: I wish HS2 a smoother debut.
Embarrassing wives
Personal dignity is an important attribute for a central bank governor, which means it’s best to avoid being publicly embarrassed by your spouse. The first president of the European Central Bank, Wim Duisenberg — as if he didn’t have enough of a challenge on his hands — had to contend with his leftist wife Gretta hanging Palestinian flags on their house in Amsterdam and being accused of making anti-Semitic remarks on television. Now the governor of the Swiss national bank, Philipp Hildebrand, has resigned after revelations that his wife sold $500,000 worth of Swiss francs last summer just before the bank intervened in the market to depress the franc’s value, then bought them back at a handsome profit. For Mrs H, a former foreign exchange trader, to point out that dollars looked ‘ridiculously cheap’ at the time, and Mr H to add that his wife ‘has always been a strong personality’, was not judged an adequate response; worse, he has been unable to prove that the transactions were done without his own knowledge. We should be thankful, then, for Lady King, the Finnish-born wife of our own governor Sir Mervyn, who is a model of discretion: so much so that she does not appear in his Who’s Who entry, and has almost never been photographed. And we can start compiling a list of candidates whose spouses’ antics surely rule them out of the governorship race when Sir Mervyn steps down in 2013 — though I’d say neither John Bercow nor Zara Phillips were strong runners in the first place.
Battersea revival
I was not entirely persuaded by John Buckingham’s proposal (Letters, last week) to turn the financially intractable hulk of Battersea power station into a giant crematorium, but a couple of other intriguing ideas have also reached me. The first is from a reader who tells me that when the site was in receivership in the 1990s, he proposed converting it into a world-class opera house, with multiple stages, restaurants, parking and a rail link from Victoria, the cost to be substantially defrayed by the sale of the existing Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. He sent his plan, complete with financial model, to the then ROH chief — who replied succinctly, ‘Dear Sir, what an amusing idea. Yours ever, Jeremy Isaacs.’
The second proposition is more practical and, given the failure of every alternative for the past 36 years, perhaps even obvious — but also, I fear, more provocative. It comes from Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist whose dismissive views on man-made climate change, in his book Heaven and Earth and elsewhere, cause the likes of George Monbiot to froth at the mouth. ‘Best solution,’ emails Plimer, is to reopen Battersea ‘as a two-gigawatt low-sulphur low-ash coal-fired thermal power station providing employment-creating base-load power which [Chris Huhne’s] proposed 32,000 wind turbines could never provide in a month of Sundays.’
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