It’s just dawned on me that when I started my present job a year ago, I made a big mistake. I showed my new contract to my wife, but I never let Alistair Darling have sight of it for his approval.

It never occurred to me that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had any business nosing around the private arrangements between me and my employer. Silly me. On Wednesday the Government will announce legislation to let it do just that.

As it happens, it does not have journalists’ contracts as its target. It has only one group in mind: bankers. It intends to make the Financial Services Authority vet bankers’ employment arrangements and decide whether they are permissible. Specifically, it is focused on bonuses.

In strikingly Orwellian language, Mr Darling demanded yesterday that bankers behave as “fellow citizens”. In other words, they must submit themselves to the rest of us to say yea or nay to them.

Forget that, under the proposed legislation, no other “fellow citizens” will have to hand over their private contracts for approval; when it comes to banker bashing, normal rules go by the board.

In banks that the Government now owns, it should, of course, make its own rules. That’s an owner’s prerogative. The Government now also owns the East Coast Main Line rail company and can set whatever pay arrangements it deems appropriate there too.

But in private companies it has as much business regulating individual pay arrangements as I do intervening in how much Sir Terry Leahy gets paid for running Tesco.

Bolstering shareholders’ ability to set the parameters for executive pay would be a serious move that showed a real concern with the functioning of a capitalist economy.

But this plan has nothing to do with economic efficiency or financial stability. It’s based solely on the popular sport of banker bashing, and that there will be a general election next spring. That the proposed legislation might do permanent damage to London as a financial centre is clearly irrelevant to Mr Darling. He is concerned with only one thing. From January onwards, the newspapers will be full of stories of bankers’ bonuses. There will be public anger. And the Government wants a bit of the populist action.

Here’s a prediction: this will be tied up in all sorts of legal knots when challenged. But for the Government, only one court matters: the one that Harriet Harman infamously referred to as the “court of public opinion”. And its verdict is both certain and illegitimate.

Stephen Pollard is editor of The Jewish Chronicle

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