A Deserving Sort of Chap

Hard-working families, bursary-free nurses and other beneficiaries of the Osbornomic miracle will rejoice in the news that there is at least one man in the country who has been historically underpaid and still deserves a rise. Nic Budden, the chief executive of an estate agent company, has graciously allowed his basic wage to be inflated past the half-million mark, with an increased maximum bonus of £825,000 - a small but significant improvement on the beggarly £576,562.50 which was previously on offer. The company has recorded a fall in profits, and its shares fell by a third between last June and the end of the year; but this is purely because Londoners are very inconsiderately squatting on their ever more affordable equity, and has nothing at all to do with any reluctance on the part of corporate fat cats to get on their bikes and look for transactions. Naturally, like most CEOs most of the time, Budden deserves credit for adapting and growing into an enlarged role, rather than whining about being spread too thin, after the manner of certain shirkers in the hated public sector who deal in mere lives instead of actual property.