Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I love more of an evening, when the kids have finally collapsed and I’ve made it back downstairs to sit down, than kicking back with a glass of red to watch one of the titans of the Premiership get humiliated in Europe.

I adore watching football on telly. This may be because I could never play that well myself. My late father turned up to watch me in the school 4ths, aged 11, and remarked afterwards that I was the first midfielder he’d ever seen who jumped up to head a ball when it was a full forty feet away. The reason it’s so compelling is it remains one of the few genuinely dramatic things on the box. (One is never entirely sure, these days,  if the result of the latest one day cricket international has been pre-ordained by a betting syndicate in Doha or Lahore.)

With football you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next. Who will be the next oaf to mouth a racially abusive epithet? Can that forward get into the penalty area before hitting the deck, writhing in agony, as if felled by a volley of fire from a Gatling gun?

Football is the real drama deal unlike the host of lousy reality/property nonsense on Channel 4 with its faux jeopardy. Will Ken and Tina, the hopeful couple on  ‘Location Location Location’ have their offer accepted on their wow-factored, pebble-dashed dream home in Surbiton?   Who gives a monkey’s?

It’s great to watch but something is very rotten in the state of British football.  You don’t have to have followed the wretched tale of how Harry Redknapp conducted his business affairs to get a strong sense that football does not appear to adhere to the same rules of business as the rest of us.

Now the “proud” Ibrox club, Glasgow Rangers, has entered administration on Tuesday after HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) pursued legal action at the Court of Session in Edinburgh over alleged unpaid VAT and PAYE totalling about £9m. Maddened, spit-flecked fans threatened to lynch the owners. ( It’s only a game, boys. Possibly the most moronic quote ever to emanate from football was Shankley’s pious  ‘Football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s far more important than that.’ Sorry, Bill. It isn’t and wasn’t. It’s entertainment. Ken Dodd on grass over 90 minutes.)

Now the heat is on. The  Treasury’s coffers are near bare. The party is over. HMRC is getting nasty and is quite willing to force more of these  clubs into administration. Quite right. When I think about the unholy stink made about Stephen Hester’s £1 million bonus then I consider that hideous mess into which Glasgow Rangers descended this week, I do wonder.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Rangers are also awaiting the outcome of a tax tribunal over a disputed bill, plus penalties, totalling £49m. Club chairman Craig Whyte, who took control of the club from Sir David Murray in May of last year, has said this potential liability to HMRC could reach up to £75m if the club lost the tribunal. How have they been allowed to get away with this?

What appears clear is that a good number of clubs in recent years have used an emotional blackmail on the revenue – that they were so vital to the fabric of their local communities that they needed to be excused actually handing over the income tax and national insurance from their players’ massive pay packets. All pretty stinky.

The question is now – has Rangers put contagion into the air? AT  Kearney is putting the boot in with some very worrying predictions. ‘In 2010, we warned of the similarities between football and banking asking whether football was too popular to fail. The financial woes of Rangers seem to confirm they mirror in many ways. The question is now: is Rangers the Lehman Brothers of football?’ Harry Redknapp as Dick Fauld. I wonder if the latter claims he was hindered in his business dealings by having a reading age of a two year old.

In both football and banking, managers have lost the power to manage. The talent argument has been used to enable the lunatics – in this case the rain-making bankers and players on £175,000 per week – to take over the asylum. The bosses are held to ransom – ‘reward me with unimaginable amounts of money or I walk.’ This is an unsustainable way to carry on.

So the Mob has got its way and is currently parading Stephen Hester’s head around the City on the end of a pikestaff. Metaphorically speaking. (To a banker his bonus is as vital as his head.) What this whole disturbing episode shows, yet again, is the disaster that often comes to pass when business and politics meet.  Hester is the one banker who has been beheaded because he was the one individual that government – urged on by the mob – could most easily humiliate and cut down to size. He is, after all, a government employee of sorts.

Except, of course, a civil servant he isn’t. You simply cannot run a bank – especially one which has a substantial investment bank included – as a public sector enterprise. RBS isn’t the NHS or English Heritage and never can be. It’s a nonsense.  The worse things get at RBS and the more politicians become involved in its operation the more likely it is we will never get our money back.  One thing is for sure – we may not have much confidence in the ability of politicians to run the country but their ability to run a bank is even more questionable.

A couple of other thoughts: how motivated would you feel today as you arrived at your desk if you were Stephen Hester? Would you be 100% fired up to give your all on behalf of the organisation and therefore the UK tax payer? How he must now feel about his decision to ‘help out’ by joining a bankrupt bank. I can just imagine the conversation with Gordon Brown’s people: ‘Great sense of duty… blah blah blah…  definite seat in the House of Lords… blah blah. Do the right thing.’ Well Hester has paid the penalty for being seduced. Who could blame him if he walks out? And the quality of the list of individuals to replace him will be pretty poor.

What this has done is ram home – if it wasn’t already glaringly obvious – that the majority of the UK population now loathes bankers with a passion and will do whatever it can to make their lives hard and indeed even bring them down. Well, fine.  Let’s chase them all out of town and see where that gets us. This morning, RBS shares were down to 27p, almost half the price the taxpayer paid for them in 2009 – a loss of £300m.  Public anger about high pay may be understandable but zeroing in on Hester will ultimately solve nothing.

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?