So we come to the end of yet another desperate week of teeth-gnashing, snarling and outrage about money. People either receiving or not receiving their just desserts. A cap of £26, 000 on benefit-receiving families, Stephen Hester and his just-shy-of-a-million bonus. As we edge towards the gyre, the national mood gets uglier and uglier.

There is now so much political capital to be made from banker’s bonuses, so much to be gained from whipping up the mob, that we risk losing all sense of reason on this matter. Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: “A bonus of nearly a million pounds looks to ordinary people like he [Hester] has won the lottery – with a ticket they paid for.” So what is Mr Kenny advocating? That all 57 million of us share Hester’s bonus. Typical that Kenny should think Hester’s earnings are a merely a matter of luck.

Bankers, with their parallel universe of money-grubbing selfishness that has landed the lot of us in the stuck, make me as cross as any normal human. But we have got £45 billion of our hard-earned cash tied up in RBS. People seem to find it impossible to accept that we, as taxpayers, want, indeed desperately need, the bank to do well. Do you think for one second that any Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley smart guy – who is currently collecting a bonus well in excess of a million – would want to go anywhere near the hot seat at RBS? To be pilloried in The Daily Mail, spat at in the street, have his kids bullied school? It’s a tough, nasty job and Hester appears to be making a reasonable fist of it. He has a top-notch CV and could easily earn a lot more money, and garner a lot less public outrage, elsewhere.

Hester is not Fred Goodwin. He’s trying to clear up Goodwin’s wreck. And he didn’t have to do it. There were far easier ways out there to make a living and he is already a wealthy man. But he is not a charity. We own 84% of this company and, in the long run, we want out. So we need a leader to do a decent job and turn the thing around. If it’s true that both Hester and his board would have walked if the bonus was not forthcoming then that would have left the bank, and us, in an even sorrier state.

Wherever Stephen Hester will enjoy his supper tonight, I’m glad I’m not him. It cannot be pleasant at the moment, million bonus or no million bonus.

Call me perverse but I find myself more taxed by the operatives of the Docklands Light Railway who have blackmailed their pusillanimous managers into giving them each a £2500 bonus during the Olympics, simply for turning up for work rather than throwing a sickie. Sorry but isn’t it their job to pilot those trains whether there is an Olympics on or not? Note that DLR trains are fully automated so in theory they don’t even need operators on board. I won’t even bother asking the rhetorical question about any degree of pride in what they do.

Meanwhile, in other news….Barclays have just announced that worldwide they received 107,000 applications for jobs from graduates last year. This would appear to show there are plenty of young people out there who wish to become mini Diamonds and Hesters. Their career paths are likely to be bumpy, and dinner party conversations about what they do for a living testy, for some time to come. If that doesn’t put them off, what right does anyone else have to try to do so?