As David Cameron takes on executive pay, Boris Johnson reflects on Margaret Thatcher’s contempt for “complacent men”:
Thatcher wasn’t against money, and she wasn’t against pay as an incentive to real exertion and real talent. But … she would have been totally opposed to all that now whiffs of a male-dominated cartel, a you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours conspiracy against the shareholders and the wider interests of the company. Thatcher was brought up a Methodist, with a deep attachment to the values of the Protestant work ethic.
She would have been against any kind of crony capitalism, and as for the solution – well, she would not have wanted pay set by politicians, and she would not have gone for any kind of continental-style socialism. But I reckon she would certainly have gone for any kind of poujadiste revolt that gave shareholders a simple way of voting down pay awards they thought were excessive. In tackling boardroom greed, David Cameron is not bucking the market. He is acting in the true Thatcherite tradition of the Conservative Party, because male clubbiness, jobbery, idleness and complacency were the very things Margaret Thatcher fought against all her political career.
The Dish 