Call it legitimate grievance, or sour grapes. Whatever you call it, fund managers are becoming aggravated by investment consultants beating them to business in a way they consider unfair.

The problem has a name: fiduciary management. This is a way of managing a large pool of assets, such as a pension fund, that has been imported to the UK from the Netherlands in recent years. A fiduciary manager takes full executive charge of all the client's investments, and related services such as hedging its liabilities. This is not the way the UK's pension funds have typically been managed.