Leave Stephen Hester alone.

That Stephen Hester, eh? Who does he bloody think he is?

His base salary is £1,220,000, and he’s been offered a bonus of £963,000. Ed Miliband said

It's just not fair, it's not right, and it's not the bankers paying their fair share. ... I don't think he should be getting his bonus, you know the state still owns a share in the Royal Bank of Scotland, tax payers are still, you know, footing the bill for what's happening at the Royal Bank of Scotland. If responsibility means anything, I don't think he should be getting his bonus.

I think this bonus sounds totally reasonable. If you combine it with his salary, Hester’s remuneration comes to £2,183,000. The profit of RBS in 2010 – and bear in mind that in 2008 it posted a record-breaking loss of £24,100,000,000 – was £2,100,000,000. That’s just under one thousand times as much as Hester earned this year, and represents a Hester-led increase of £26,200,000,000 per year. Paying a couple of million for that is just good sense. I don’t know how much of the £2.1 billion profit RBS reinvested, but as 83% shareholders, one presumes the Treasury is getting a significant dividend here, and presumably Hester (unlike, say, Lord Ashcroft) pays income tax, so realistically we’re only giving him £481,500. And since we only own 83% of the bank, we are only giving him £399,645. That is a pitiful amount in the context of running a bank, and if that’s what the board of directors thinks is a sensible offer to keep Hester at his desk and working hard then it seems downright stupid for some MP to assume he knows better and try to block it.

Another person hired to turn around a worrying financial trend was David Cameron, and while RBS has turned a £24 billion loss into a £2 billion profit, the UK has plunged into a second recession because Cameron ignored all economists’ advice and cut everything that he, a rich idiot living in a palace in the country somewhere presumably, didn’t personally use. If anyone should have his salary withheld, it’s Cameron. Perhaps, then it isn’t simple maturity which is preventing Cameron from attacking Hester, but a weird self-interest. In either case, though, it annoys me that Miliband is capitalising on this. He said,

It's a disgraceful failure of leadership by the Prime Minister. He’s been promising for months action against excessive bonuses, executive pay, and now he’s nodded through a million-pound bonus. He’s also been lecturing shareholders about how they need to be more active in holding executives to account.

Stephen Hester oversaw the recovery of RBS from the brink of bankruptcy to a £2 billion profit. He is not one of the reckless, irresponsible lunatic bankers who caused the recession, so blocking his bonus holds nobody to account. If anything, it shows that bonuses are unrelated to performance and you should just do whatever you like. It’s just petty-minded, pantomime-villain-of-the-week bullshit. RBS is a bank, ergo Hester is a banker, ergo he is evil, ergo he should have no tax money.

The fact is, though, it isn’t tax money. It’s the profits of a bank. It’s half of a tenth of a percent of the profits of a bank. This man is not a public servant. He’s a businessman. And it’s absurd to compare his pay to MPs and civil servants when he could very easily clear out his enormous desk and go get a job at some other bank, still get his £2 million paycheque, and leave RBS to flounder back into loss taking all our investment with it.

And maybe he still doesn’t deserve his bonus, and maybe the board of directors did get it wrong, but that doesn’t make the standard of debate which has so far surrounded that possibility any better.