In his ethics lecture at the UK's Securities Institute last week, Alastair Ross Goobey, former chief executive of Hermes and paid-up member of the Great and the Good, took a rather unkind swipe at another member, Sir John Banham.

Ross Goobey recounted that "Banham, as chairman of Whitbread, wrote a piece at the height of the dot-com boom lamenting the fact that perfectly good ‘old economy' company shares were being sold for reinvestment in the fashionable ‘tech' sector. I responded that part of the reason was that some fund managers were being fired because they did not have a high-enough exposure to the growth stocks. The people doing the sacking were the executives of old economy companies. I asked Sir John to examine what had been going on at the Whitbread pension fund. The answer was that they too had sacked a ‘value' manager and appointed someone who had a good short-term record from investment in the TMT sectors." Gotcha.