On this side of the Pond, we found it a bit strange that, in the US, CEO and CFO pay at more than 100 banks on the TARP program did not decline in line with profits. In the City, there’s much dissatisfaction at guaranteed bonuses being waved at some lucky so-and-so’s by banks still owing millions to the government. Muttering taxpayers are saying “But it’s our darned dosh they’re throwing at these guys, not theirs.” The resentment among those who’ve lost jobs, bonuses and taken a big hit on their pension pots is running feverishly high.

It’s no wonder then that, this past March, the FSA, in an effort to align executive compensation with risk for bank boards and management, recommended that two-thirds of bonuses should be deferred, and that individual compensation awards should also reflect the overall performance of the business, rather than that person, team or division. More puzzling, however, is the Financial Services Authority’s recent pull back from the sterner draft suggestions.

Which highlights a big part of the difficulty of imposing pay limits: the lack of consensus among financial regulators around the globe. Even within Britain there are conflicts: while the UK Treasury may favour a tough line on banker remuneration and bonuses, Hector Sants of the FSA has defended super-size bonuses stating: “If politicians believe it is a problem that should be remedied, they should do so using the appropriate mechanisms such as taxation.” Global agreement on regulation in financial services looks to be a tough nut to crack.

‘Performance-related pay’ was a mantra (when it wasn’t an excuse) much beloved by bankers in the past. It was nonsense then, and it still is, of course. Performance as measured in bursting deal books rather than risk exposure was the norm, and some happy trading chappies danced home with enormous sums while leaving their employers exposed to a level of toxic debt that we still haven’t quite got our heads around.

And there are a very few sane voices around: Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, suggested (to a deafening lack of enthusiasm) that a Pay Commission be set up to measure the claims of top earners “that their rewards are justified and necessary, even if they offend our sense of fairness.”

Ah, that wonderful word, fairness. It makes me go all misty-eyed, hankering for those days of yore when the City was a fair place where one’s word was one’s bond. When you had trust, the profits followed, nice and tidily. Maybe not huge ones, but sure, steady, reliable ones.

The City is no longer a place of loyalty, trust or fairness. Mega-profit-at-all-costs mania has brought it to the brink of destruction, much the same as Wall Street. But it appears the lessons have not been learned, and I have a sneaky feeling we’ll be revisiting this topic again and again as the cycle swings first up, and then back down again, as it surely will.

I must confess that any article I write about executive pay in the financial world puts me into a minor bind: I can’t write entirely objectively about it when my family circumstances and mortgage depend so heavily on the bucks brought home by my banker husband. You’ll maybe appreciate that it’s a topic I dwell on rather a lot at the moment.

Those bucks have taken a battering in recent years, what with a couple of redundancies and an upcoming bank bankruptcy belting our income in a too-familiar scenario for many of you working in the profession. The days of socking great bonuses have been long gone for us for some years now, so it is with some bemusement that I read stories of guaranteed mega-payments being dished out to ‘rainmaker’ stars even as their employers suffer losses in markets still reeling from the crunch. It makes me royally cranky and leaves me wondering what planet are these guys living on because it certainly doesn’t look anything like mine.

Really modern women want to do more than just act as an attractive clothes horse. We want to make a difference – and sometimes having a man in tow can slow you down. There is an exception to this: I’ve mentioned Queen Rania of Jordan before – bright, educated, capable, beautiful – and making a valuable contribution to women’s health, education and their role in Jordan and wider Islamic society. The world could do with more like her.

But when you think of all the powerful women on the world stage today like our Queen Elizabeth, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Maggie Thatcher in her heyday, Germany’s Angela Merkel, only Hillary can claim that her other half is as much – if not more – famous than she is. Interestingly, he hasn’t minded her sharing the glory, even though the balance of power there has demonstrably moved. And so Hillary memorably pointed it out in her lovely terse response that ‘Bill Clinton is not the Secretary of State. I am,’ at that infamous Congolese press briefing after her recent African whirlwind tour.

On this side of the pond, we admire Prince Philip for being a terrific consort who has never stolen the limelight from his majestic spouse. We know almost zero about Oprah’s other half. Mrs Thatcher’s Denis famously took a back seat. And I don’t know anyone who knows anything about Mr Merkel. It seems that powerful women don’t really need a consort up there on the podium with them. A prince on your arm might be ‘nice to have’ but it is not a necessity.

We tend not to tag our men as ‘husband of’ (unless it’s Brad Pitt) or ‘father of’ (same again). The men who run Coca-Cola, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, NASA and McDonald’s (insert your favourite global businesses of choice here) are never bracketed this way. It’s time women weren’t either.

While no one can deny that equality for women (and girls) is a desirable and thoroughly deserved destiny for us of the so-called weaker sex, there are some strident voices decrying the pink, princessy world that Disney,Toys‘R’Us and fictional romances line up for young girls from as young as three.

I am majestically perplexed:  what’s wrong with being a Princess?

Having reared three daughters (and a son) in the last couple of decades, my house has sometimes resembled Barbie Hell: nylon-haired, blonde dolls of improbable curvature, lovingly adorned in cheap iridescent frills and furbelows.  Such as these littered the playroom and the girls’ bedrooms for several years.

And it hasn’t made a blind bit of difference to their education or career choices.  Senior daughter took Physics and Maths at our higher education level, but opted to study Law at university.  Next in line has an interest in History and Politics which she aims to study next year if she gets the necessary grades (about which we have our royal digits firmly crossed).  Youngest daughter is fascinated by Economics.  So much for channelling them into the ‘pink’ and traditionally female roles. 

Thus intones The Times:  “Some argue that the merchandising of dolls such as the Disney princesses only perpetuates these gender divides.  ‘{Princess dolls} are promoting a very narrow and prescriptive view of femininity, and one that out to be outmoded in the 21^st century.  I think they are regressive,” says Dr. Melanie Waters, lecturer in English Literature and specialist in feminist theory at Northumbria University. 

“They encourage girls to be passive, and to nurture.”  There is also, says Dr. Waters: “an aggressive focus on beauty, hair accessories and other images that promote the idea that girls should be concerned with their appearance.”

I humbly disagree. Majesty does bling, as shown by our cherished Queen Elizabeth with her spectacular line in rocks and frocks. Nobody’s accused her of being pink and feeble.  She’s both an awesome female and enormously effective monarch.

Rare is the woman that wouldn’t love to have a dress made just for her, just for a special occasion.  I, too, have a hankering for the satin and the sparkly.  I even own a tiara, which I once wore to a fancy-dress party where all we girls indulged ourselves to the hilt with eBay-bought rhinestones.  The median age of the crowd there was 40, made up of bankers, lawyers, doctors, and journalists.  

Just a little word of exhortation from your roving royal across the Pond:

You don’t have to sacrifice your inner Princess to be successful, my dear girls. A liking for finery and frills is never going to be a death knell to feminist principles.  We deserve equality, we’ve earned equality, and if we want to be princesses, we can pay for it ourselves.

“I am so sorry. Big Kiss.  My love to you and the girls.  Hold them close.” Catherine Bailey’s tragic last words to her husband just before the successful City lawyer and mother of three daughters drowned herself in the Thames earlier this year.

The resulting heartbreak for her young family, and consternation and sadness among colleagues at her law firm has been widely covered in the UK press.  

Ms. Bailey was a partner dealing with banking and regulatory disputes, including Financial Services Authority investigations. The current economic crisis put her skills as a financial litigator to the forefront with a significantly increased workload.  Returning to work six months after the birth of her third daughter into an environment where partners regularly worked 60+ hours a week, Ms. Bailey would probably also have had to take home work in the evenings and over weekends to keep up.

The pressure on partners to perform in the current difficult climate is not confined to SJ Berwin, where Ms Bailey’s worked, having made partner in 2003.  The law firm has seen revenues slump by nearly 15%, with partner profits down by a massive 49%.  In an effort to cut costs the firm made 40 junior lawyers redundant. Straitened times will have been tough on everyone working there. 

As reported in The Times, Alison Thompson, the coroner, told the court: “Ms Bailey was a very capable and professional woman and a loving mother of three young children who found it hard to meet the demands of motherhood and the high standard she had set herself.”  

As a mother myself, I can’t imagine the despair that led this successful, devoted mother to kill herself in the chill waters of the Thames rather than carry on with a life that had become unbearable to her. 

While no blame attaches to her colleagues at work, it is symbolic of a professional culture that Catherine Bailey had to conceal her growing panic from her loved ones and peers in the work place.  Not coping is not an option in today’s high-pressure environment, and in Britain, particularly, admitting to having problems balancing life and work is severely hampered by an unfortunate tradition of ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’, severely restricting the options for those struggling to keep it all together. 

It isn’t uncommon for many women in the legal and banking profession to overcompensate for perceived weaknesses by working longer and harder than their male counterparts.  Combining this with the incessant demands of a very young family has seen many a senior woman weeping in the dark, despairing of ever ‘having it all’ without  having to ‘do it all’ at the same time. 

It doesn’t help that in order to be a success in any profession, generally speaking you have to be a Type A personality – driven, ambitious, intelligent and a perfectionist.  Mixing that with the primal demands of early motherhood and its utter lack of order and routine is a toxic cocktail.   

So, what to do about it?  Having seen many young women transform from idealistic professionals to exhausted cynics in my time, I can only recommend talking remedies:

• Get your support system up and running before you enter the Parent Trap.  You need your friends – of either gender - to remind you of a time when you were perceived as a bright human being, not just a 24-hour zombie with a milk supply;
• Don’t expect to work the same way after you have children as you did before.  I’ve said it before in this column, and I’ll doubtless have to say it again, but you will work smarter for having had to learn to cram everything into the tiny window that children allow you in the early years.  The long-hours culture at some law firms takes no account of this whatsoever, and it needs to do so;
• Accept you are not Superwoman, just a pretty good facsimile of her;
• Don’t be shy about accepting help from whatever quadrant it’s offered, and, even more important:
• Don’t shrink from asking for it.  It isn’t an admission of failure, it’s an acceptance of reality. Any halfway decent manager or partner will see that, and respect you for it. 

Finally, for those women fearing professional burnout, it’s important to remember that however horrible your current circumstances, they are of finite duration:  ‘This Too Shall Pass.’  It’s served me well over some turbulent years.

Yeah, we used to have Dress Down Fridays, but these days it’s as likely to see a banker in casuals as it is to catch sight of a Dodo – the world’s a much less relaxed place, especially in the financial district. Sartorially, it’s much more Brooks Brothers than Gap, and the more somber, the better, too. As a barometer of the money world’s health and happiness, the more uptight the dressing, the worse things are. So it seems that the City’s mixing its messages: we’re all told that the Worst Is Over, but the attire is sending a different message entirely.

I don’t know about Wall Street, but the City’s still rather gloomy, in spite of the occasionally brilliant weather. Talk about green shoots of recovery seems to have gone a bit quiet, as the banks carry on an orgy of recrimination and finger pointing. More write-downs and glum forecasts adorn the info pages every week.

It’s all getting a bit boring and samey, so, in the Royal Spirit of Keep Calm and Carry On, I’m going to write about something cheerful instead.

In a fabulous display of political sleight-of-hand, Gordo’s Government is desperately flogging the idea of a new parliamentary program offering titbits to the populace: ‘affordable housing’; ‘improving schools and safeguarding children’; ‘digital economy’ and suchlike, all to be funded by us while pretending that we haven’t recently hocked the family silver for the next couple of decades.

However cynical you are about politics, you can’t be any more cynical than the Great British Public at this point. We’ve heard it all before. And we know that if anything does come of it, we’ll have to pay through the nose for it too.

But there’s one fabulous little nugget buried in the about-to-become legislation which got my heart beating a little faster, and brought a broad (if majestic) grin to my face: The Equality Bill.

This bill harnesses all the tatty bits of anti-discrimination law and adds several new measures into one blanket piece of legislation. It will force companies in the UK to publish the difference in salaries they pay to men and women. At a cost of some £117-million (you do the math – the exchange rate’s been so bad for us Brits I don’t have the heart to do it for you) we’re finally going to achieve something meaningful on the gender agenda.

The financial services industry is notorious for having the biggest pay gap between its female and male workers. That could be about to change…

And yes, we know that some firms may fudge it, attempting to dodge the issue with pay scales and ladders and accountability panels and management mumbling about commitment to equality employment. But they’ll have to prove it now. And I think that’s going to leave some rather red faces across the Square Mile.

Which will be much more appealing to my regal self than all that pale flesh broiling nicely whenever the sun shines in the City’s outside spaces at the moment…

Enjoy the sunshine while it lasts, wherever you are…

Writing about City folk in general and bankers in particular has been a gruesome gore-fest lately. Ever more lurid stories of greed and excess and jaw-dropping incompetence have graced broadsheet, tabloid and web pages alike for months on end.  One thing the Great British Public fail to forgive is being taken for a ride and, between the banks and the parliamentary expenses scandals, it’s been a helter-skelter rollercoaster ride all the way. 

In time-honoured fashion, we Brits have selected one or two personalities for particular condemnation.  We used to stick them in the stocks and throw rotten eggs at them, but these days we’re a bit more sophisticated:  they get drubbed in the media. 

In UK banking, the sites are set on Sir ‘Fred the Shred’ Goodwin, erstwhile jugular executive at The Royal Bank of Scotland who managed to finagle a staggering pension pot considering he’d brought an august institution to its knees with pure, erm, financial irresponsibility? Mismanagement? Rotten bad luck?  Whatever, you pick.  Fred fled.  Somewhere nice, sunny and probably rather expensive.

The tax-paying populace took it considerably amiss that their heavily taxed pounds will now pay the unlovely Fred a massive pension, payable while he is only nudging 50.  Peeved the people a lot, that did.  Especially since they’re losing their jobs in droves, or working way past retirement age to fund their old age.
Great British pragmatism being what it is, many wage earners shrug, carry on and accept that fiddling politicians and a handful of dodgy bankers are a small price to pay for stable and pretty safe democracy with a penchant for pageantry.

Which is where I disagree.  

If you want to get me all het up and in a right royal bother about business bullies, tell me a story of injustice.  Especially in the workplace.  Our Fred the Shred shed, well, shedloads of people in his mission to cut costs.  Maybe even some of those who were warning about his bank’s dangerous exposure to toxic debt and the mortgage mess.  But he got away with culling vast numbers, as have others and, sadly, will again, unless the corporate culture changes rather dramatically.

Her Majesty’s Government is busy tossing expensive sops to the banks to keep them afloat while thousands lose their jobs and small businesses die for want of a line of credit from those self-same banks.  Not much is flowing out from the banks in the way of loans, either mortgage or business.  I’m no economist, but I do find that rather startling.

Rescuing really ailing businesses is, admittedly, a tricky scenario.  Rescuing a bank on the verge of crashing and burning is seen by some as criminally stupid.    You don’t supply Viagra to a man with a heart condition, why inject cash into an institution which managed to lose nearly all of its stash of the readies before now?

I’ll ‘fess up a vested interesting the banking sector:  my Consort, as we will call him, has worked for some of the biggies over the years.  He’s been treated extremely well and utterly appallingly by some household names, all who shall remain nameless. 

Consort was working for a boutique investment bank earlier this year. Last year it paid its senior execs some eye-popping bonuses.  From Christmas it neglected to pay him.  He was told he had to keep going into work, and that the money would be forthcoming.  It wasn’t.  No salary, no expenses, no healthcare, no PAYE, no National Insurance for four months. Eventually, in April, he was forced to leave, luckily scoring another position elsewhere.  He still hasn’t been paid by his former employers.

We’re off to the Employment Tribunal in August to beg them to get him his cash. Meantime, we’ve been told that the bank’s management is busy whizzing off assets and invoiceable income from his firm into other business ventures.  When they’ve stripped it clean, they’ll close the bit of the business that employed Consort (and about twenty others – all still unpaid, we hear).  So when we get to court, there will be no viable business, no money, and no way of paying him even if he wins because all the assets have been shifted out.  But we’re doing it anyway because you have to stand your ground and shout when things like this happen.  Rolling over and playing dead just encourages more bad behaviour.  

It only takes a little spot of rot to spoil the barrel of apples.  Letting the little sins slide in is a slippery slope.  Squeaky clean, that’s what City types need to be.  It may be difficult to scrub out the bad practices that have become so prevalent, but that’s no excuse for not trying.

Good behaviour goes with good governance, which begets trust, and trust brings profitable transactions benefiting everyone.  Time we tried it.