When I read last week about Stephen Hester's £9.6m ($15.8m) pay packet, I felt a sting of moral outrage. That the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland should be earning quite so much struck me as the most grotesquely excessive executive pay deal there has ever been.
It is not just that he is paying himself 600 times more than one of his bank's tellers or that he is getting considerably more than the heads of Lloyds or Citibank. The true outrage is this: at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where we were both students, Steve (as he was then) Hester was in the year below. When I was just starting my second year at university, Steve was a fresher and I viewed him as inferior in two ways. He was in the first intake of boys at the red-brick women's college, and these boys were mostly rejects from the ancient men's colleges and were, on the whole, pretty poor specimens. More damningly still, Steve was 18¾, whereas I was 20¼.
Fast forward 30 years and Stephen is still a year and a half younger than I am – he is now 48½ and, as of last Friday, I am 50. Therefore, for him to be paid that much is not only gross, it feels against the natural order.