Who says we can’t replace grossly overpaid top executives for less?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I’m baffled why anyone should be offended by the £275,000 salary paid to John Fingleton, the director of the Office of Fair Trading who was declared last week to be Britain’s highest-paid public servant. Even if Fingleton’s wad represents double the prime minister’s, it is barely more than one tenth of the bundle taken home by Adam Crozier in his final year as chief executive of the Royal Mail, which — despite Vince Cable’s declared intention to press ahead with part-privatisation — is still wholly in the state sector. The Teflon-coated Crozier, who came to the Royal Mail from the Football Association and has moved on to become chief executive of ITV, collected £633,000 in salary, a £1.5 million bonus for ‘meeting performance targets’, and another £225,000 in pension and other benefits. While he boosted profits, he could hardly claim to have satisfied Royal Mail customers, and will be remembered as the postman who said ‘every single letter is important’ while losing hundreds of thousands of them every week.

But just as outrageous (to use a word applied, for once quite reasonably, by the Communications Workers Union) is the fact that the three Royal Mail executives below Crozier collected an average of £1.4 million each. This has all been defended on grounds of needing to attract ‘the best management talent’ by Royal Mail chairman Donald Brydon, who used to be a sensible chap when I knew him in the City. But he and the rest of the top echelon of the corporate world, urged on by their bankers, have been captured by a self-reinforcing delusion that turns astronomical numbers into ‘the rate for the job’ — while the rest of us suspect that it would be entirely possible to find a team of competent logistics experts willing to run the Royal Mail for, ooh, let’s say £275,000 apiece.