Every now and then, somebody lets the fat cat out of the bag. In January, it was the turn of Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica (the owners of British Gas), to say the unsayable about executive pay. His £4.5m pay package was “impossible to justify”, he said, “so there’s no point in trying to do that”. In 2016, there was a “Please, sir, I want some less” moment, when the then CEO of the Co-Op Group, Richard Pennycook, sought a 60% cut in his pay package as, he argued, his job had got simpler after a restructuring.
But such episodes are unusual, and are often drowned out by the collective tutting and teeth-sucking of the top executive class. These admissions cause embarrassment and are not the story the business elite want to tell.
