I’m no fan of Sir Fred Goodwin. In the boom years whenever MT contacted RBS in search of an interview with him, we were met with sneers - if we actually got a return call. The outfit was hubris writ large. They got what was coming to them. 

But I spoke this week to a female business grandee who has run some large organisations in the UK and sat on the boards of several others. She was shocked at the venom being directed towards Goodwin. 'It’s amazing,' she said. 'I’ve had to fire people for criminal culpability and they left without any compensation. But they kept their pension. You can’t take away their pension.' Goodwin may have been a swollen-headed, ruthless son-of-a-gun whose woeful judgement led his organisation into the mire. But he’s not a criminal. Bernie Madoff’s a thief but Fred isn’t. He had a contract enforceable in law and you cannot break that contract.

What’s happened to our banking system brings out the worst in the British. The relentless search for a scapegoat to be marched out in front of the public and left swinging on Tyburn Tree is an ugly business. It’s the same sort of hysterical tabloid mentality that seeks to hunt down child-molesters and burn them out of their homes. However much damage he’s caused, what can be the justification for creating a mood so ugly that the man is forced to take his kids out of school because he feared for their safety?

No. I’d rather all those clever dicks in government and the Treasury expended their energy, emotional and cerebral, on getting us out of this mess rather than stoking up mob wrath over one man’s pension. It’s a dead end street (albeit a convenient distraction from their own role in proceedings).

I knew things had gone too far when Harriet Harman weighed in with her nonsense. What Ms Harman knows about business and contract law could be written on the back of a cigarette packet. A packet of ten. A Labour grandee, despairing of Brown’s unpopularity and inability to win next year's election, told me recently that Harriet has 'cut-through' with middle England, especially among women; that she might be the answer to fend off Cameron. I’ve never met Ms Harman, but I suspect I wasn't alone in a wry snigger when I saw those Fathers 4 Justice outlaws on her roof last year. At best, you could say that she divides opinion - so if that's the best they can come up with, Labour are in almost as much trouble as Sir Fred.