Fat cats, schmat cats. Veteran war correspondents become inured to gore and suffering: financial journalists are starting to feel the same about boardroom pay.
We have seen so many undeserved seven-digit packages, so many pay-offs rewarding failure, so many shameless pension top-ups. We shrug when four directors of the cable group Telewest get a total £690,000 in "performance-related bonuses", their performance being to preside over a business brought to its knees. We yawn and turn to something more interesting, like the shape of the yield curve when Tesco reports that no fewer than eight of its directors hit the million-pound jackpot last year.
But the recent spat over executive pay at Prudential was different. Jonathan Bloomer, the chief executive of Britain's biggest investment institution, was ambushed by his own peers.
The mighty Pru was forced to shelve its executive bonus scheme just 24 hours before a shareholder vote because of a revolt led not by a handful of Labour-controlled council pension funds but by six of the biggest City institutions, including CGNU, Legal & General and Standard Life, which could normally be relied on not to rock the boat.
Two of the rebels were not exactly squeaky clean when it came to their own rewards. Pru executives were angry anyway that after five months of consultation these shareholders were kicking up a fuss at the last minute. But they were absolutely seething that one of the rebels could be Schroders, an organisation renowned for its boardroom excess and for its quaint and quirky forms of governance.
Another rebel was Barclays Global Investors, a subsidiary of Barclays Bank, which is headed by Matt Barrett. Barrett's own pay package is a) just as complex and b) potentially just as enriching as Bloomer's would have been.
The dispute has been well aired, except in one respect: the role played by remuneration consultants in the Pru affair and in other fat-cat rows.
Remuneration consultants are the outside experts brought in to devise top pay packages. They are responsible for making them so fiendishly complicated that even fellow experts can only hazard a guess at how they work or how much they might pay out. They give spurious respectability by sprinkling the explanation of the schemes with references to "stretching targets" and "international best practice". And they are responsible for ensuring that directors always seem to collect, however dismal the company's performance.
A decade ago, they barely existed as a species. The people whom we used to deride as personnel officers started to change their spots, call themselves human resources executives and, bingo, an entire new industry was born.
Today the remuneration consultant is indispensable for any executive who wants to get rich. Shareholders and non-executive directors are mainly to blame for excessive pay. But remuneration consultants are the engineers who keep the gravy train on the rails.
Every new bonus package that pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable is seized upon by these people and adopted as the new benchmark. Dozens more packages incorporating the latest wheezes were ready to be wheeled out if the Pru scheme had gone through.
But these consultants do have an Achilles heel. They are usually attached to consulting actuaries, professionals who rely almost entirely on pension funds for their bread and butter. If pension funds and other investors really want to tackle boardroom excess, they know where they might usefully apply pressure.
David Sainsbury, the science minister, has given another £2m to the Labour Party, the latest filing from the Electoral Commission shows. This brings his total donation to £11m, 110 times more than Richard Desmond's controversial offering.
Some people think it outrageous that, given his vast business interests, Lord Sainsbury should be in the government at all. But only a cynic would think he is doing the job to further his share price rather than out of public duty.
What does irritate me, however, is the canard still being trotted out by the Department of Trade and Industry and by Sainsbury himself that his interests are held in a "blind trust". A blind trust is one where the beneficiary is unaware of the contents and has no influence on them. Surely, neither can be the case with Lord Sainsbury's trust.
He knows what's in it - a 13 per cent stake in the supermarket chain worth £990m - because he put it there in the first place, and any disposal of such a large shareholding would have to be publicly disclosed under stock exchange rules. And he must have some influence over its continued retention, otherwise it would have been sold or at least partly offloaded. No trustee could otherwise justify having so many of the family's eggs in one basket.
