Unfortunately, this created a new type of ‘fat cat’ exemplified by the Wall Street dealmaker and the mobile highly paid CEO for hire. The wheel has turned full circle in thirty years – the reformers have become the establishment and socially and economically inefficient except at feathering their own nests, protected by a weak political class.

Perhaps what Michael describes is best exemplified by Davos Culture where the great and the good hob-nob in an atmosphere where they can develop the illusion to themselves that they can control world events through ‘dialogue’. In fact, the politicians get a superficial understanding of business enough to confuse management skills with the skills needed to run a country – and businesses develop the language that can cloak their special interests in social responsibility.

Am I being cynical? I think not. ‘Davos mentality’ may have contributed significantly both to the economic crisis, if only by promoting the sin of complacency, and to the crisis on the pro-market centre-left by over-privileging the role of the private sector in solving what are essentially public interest problems.

In retrospect, perhaps Whiteboard might have done better to have drawn a clearer line between all elite business and politicians who live in a world disconnected from reality and the rest of business and public service which struggles with harsh reality every day.

(One note though on cultural difference. European non-financial business has, in general, been far better at being responsive to the public than European, but especially British, politicians. The situation would look very different in the US where corporate excesses are rightly compared negatively with the dialogue with the population at large encouraged by the Obama Administration. Whiteboard tends to see matters from a British perspective).