I woke this morning to the sound of Sir Martin Sorrell (Chairman of WPP, which owns Grey, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, JWT, Ogilvy Group, TNS and Young & Rubicam) explaining to a radio interviewer that the 70% rise in his earnings this year needed to be judged in the context of his “very low base pay”. His base pay? £1.5 million (About $2.4 million). It’s a wonder the Red Cross aren’t delivering parcels to him. If you want to see whether hearing him say this kind of thing makes blood spurt from your ears too, you can listen to the embedded stream here.

Perhaps his head-swivelling insensitivity is part of an elaborate competition with Bob “the time for remorse and apology from banks is over” Diamond of Barclays to see who can appear the bigger idiot. However, the attitude appears to be widespread. At a point at which average annual pay increases are around the 2% mark (that is lower than inflation and thus a cut in real terms), directors in the 100 companies with the biggest market cap in the UK had pay increases averaging out to 43% (or, if you prefer hard numbers, they received on average £2.7 million or $4.3 million of income). They could only be more provocative if they were driving round in top hats leering at children.