Who wants to be a millionaire? Umm… I do.

I’d especially like to be one of those millionaires who can make her money as a bonus for halving a company’s share price, even if that company is a bank 82% owned by the taxpayer making me effectively a public sector employee. Easy money. And I could tell myself it’s the same as being a nurse.

I can’t tell you how much opprobrium you’d have to heap on my head before I gave it back. You’d probably have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I’d have no truck with old adages. I’d be intent on taking it with me. But I do actually respect Stephen Hester – the chief executive officer of RBS, to whom I was incredibly subtly alluding above – for giving it back.

I can see the arguments for giving Hester his bonus (and the rest of a package that is estimated to provide him with a total remuneration of around £7.5m). Or at least, I’ve heard them repeatedly from the right-wing, committed capitalist and freemarketeer to whom I unaccountably remain married. A problem (“Oh, OK,” he concedes testily when he sees my mouth open in protest, “massive and ongoing crisis”) caused by bankers requires, however superficially objectionable it seems, bankers to solve it. And bankers expect certain levels of reward and therefore even the public sector has to stump up to the best of its ability; lest it do the whole peanuts-monkey thing.

Toryboy usually throws in at this point that Hester’s pay is still nowhere near what he could be earning in the private sector – meaning, I think, that he is part saint, not part monkey. The best thing for taxpayers, therefore, is to pay a competent man decently who can return the bank to profitability as soon as possible so that it becomes an asset instead of a liability on the state’s books and can be sold off to replenish the coffers.

"Hester should have taken his RBS bonus"