“These people never learn,” said Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman, commenting on bankers’ continuing greed despite their reliance for their continued employment on the taxpayer’s largesse. But he is not entirely right. The bankers may be clinging on to their bonuses and inflated pensions, but there is one perk they would rather forego than risk the people’s wrath, and that is shooting game birds at company expense.
It is now exactly six months since New York’s attorney-general Andrew Cuomo exploded in fury after discovering that the bosses of AIG, the American insurance giant, had treated themselves to a weekend of partridge shooting in England, even though the company had just been saved from ruin by the American taxpayer. He threatened to sue them for repayment of the £60,000 that the weekend had cost their company.
Cuomo’s robust response must have made an impression, for many bankers in the City of London have been refusing to sign up for the shooting season that opens this autumn, forcing some commercial shoots to close down and others to cut back on the number of shooting days. The manager of a shoot near Chichester once popular with banks and hedge funds said: “It’s hopeless. People don’t wish to be seen to do it. Banks can no longer budget for it and, if they have been bailed out by the taxpayer, senior people can’t be seen to leave the office.”
Frankly, I applaud this development. There are far too many pheasants bred in Britain (their number has risen recently to about a third of the human population), and millions of them end up in mass graves because nobody wants to eat them. Their main function is to meet the social aspirations of the urban nouveaux riches, which is not a good cause in which to die. It is also time to explode the myth that business cannot be successfully conducted except over food and wine and dead bird carcases.
Bankers are too embarrassed to shoot game. This can only be a positive development by Alexander Chancellor
