An unruly annual shareholder meeting is a fine thing. Small investors, who rarely have a voice during the rest of the year, get a chance to look the directors in the eye and deliver an unfiltered blast from the outside world.
The board of Barclays, during one of the bank’s many mega-bonus disgraces, endured two hours of fury at a packed Royal Festival Hall in 2014 in a classic of the genre. The directors deserved to hear it in person. At BSkyB in 2003, the body language between a prickly Rupert Murdoch, as chair, and an awkward James Murdoch, the fresh-faced new chief executive, was fascinating as the former was obliged to address the charge of nepotism.
