Bob Diamond bags a diamond tipped bonus from Barclays.

The banking business is now a computerised casino for making money out of bytes. Touch the button and zeros become prime numbers with alacrity. Bob Diamond is the chief of Barclays Bank. He gets a salary of £250,000 for his day job. For his croupier activities he gets a whopping £6,500,000!

Now I'm firmly behind David Cameron's notion that the entrepreneurial community is going to get Britain out of the mire. But what did Bob Diamond do entrepreneurially last year to get his salary paid 26 times over in ONE YEAR?

Bob Diamond tipped for Barclay's top job!

So Bob Diamond (here on the left) gets to run the show at Barclays. He's been the chief bottlewasher at Barclays Capital which is an investment bank of sorts. No more merchant banks. If Marco Polo had come looking for a loan, he'd have all his sails done over in a Polo mint livery for starters. Barclays is not flavour of the month as far as the Coalition is concerned.

But HSBC is! The new Trade Minister is none other than the Rev.Stephen Green, Anglican priest (Non Stipendiary Minister, that is!) and CEO of all he surveys at the world's local bank. He will join Vince Cable as a government trade minister, presumably as a Non Stipendiary one. This means he will enter the Lords as a reverend lord sitting not that far from the right reverend prelates. It will be interesting to see who gets in first when it comes to the problems that Mammon is causing this government.

Barclay's Bob Diamond Bags Bonus from Croesus!

Bob Diamond sees no recession. Barclay's Bank sees no recession. Gordon Brown does vaguely and all the while the national deficit gets whoppingly bigger. Bob Diamond is the American in charge of running Barclay's Bank and he carries on as if the Yellow Brick Road was real. In fact, Barclay's is no longer a bank, it has become a finance product retail shop. So much so that those with decent deposits get to be phoned up by British call centre workers trying to flog the latest "financial product" and the less financially secure get to speak to an Indian call centre with the delightful tones of 1940's English with a hint those teach yourself English CD courses. "Hello, Mr.Jones, I notice you only have two pee in your account - why is this?" "Rupee?" "No, not rupee, TOOOO PEEEE!" and the satellite phone system goes into it's own orbit.

Bob won't being getting any phone calls from Bombay. No, he's got some other place for the £63 million bonus bag. And I hardly think it's in a Barclays deposit account. "Hello, Bob, this is Brenda from Billericay, how are you doing today. Great. I thought I'd give you a call to let you know about the latest financial product we have on offer. It's got great returns!" A fantasy of course.

I find it hard to fathom where Bob Diamond and Barclays found this £63 million going spare. They aren't lending much, they aren't giving out mortgages as they used to, business is grumbling, so where did Bob make it all? Has he been to the funny money casino? It seems that this new thing called "investment banking" is just some kind of fancy money laundering, all done in the cleanest possible way, no doubt. I don't get to hear that banks have cleaned up their act. They've just re-invented the vehicle they last used. After all, if an impecunious hobo can be sold a house with a loan that, when it defaults, is wrapped up with similar loans and passed off as today's best investment deal, what chance have any of us to get a sense of the real value of money?

Who is fooling who? It seems two and two don't necessarily make four in the modern banking world. Five is just as good a number, or six or seven. Gordon Brown's arithmetic is at sixes and sevens. How do we know such an affliction isn't elsewhere?