I am thus a ‘fat cat’ and I object strongly to being associated with the likes of Mr Cedric Brown. I cannot see what he and I have in common: I have never run a gas company and he, as far as I know, has never got stuck in a cat flap. isn’t it?I HAVE received the following letter from one of my lodgers: “I am a cat who, I have been told, is volumetrically challenged. Due to circumferences beyond my control, I weigh about twice as much as my mum. But I don’t see it: surely, if you have been given enough money to stop working, you stop work That’s about as rational you can get.

“It destroys the work ethic, unless balanced by an economically rational unlimited greed.” He attributes his lack of economic rationality to being “brainwashed at the age of seven by early Bob Dylan songs”. Far from “incentivising” him, it simply allowed him to contemplate an early escape from the rat race.”My boss should never have given me a nice big bonus,” he says. He will not, however, confirm rumours that he is, as one acquaintance put it, “a functioning pothead”. Is it despite or because of all this that Lewis has managed to pull his company up from being the 48th to the sixth biggest car insurer in the USA?Retirement bonusALL this talk about fat cats and executive share options has led me to think about the capitalist system – to wit, does it work? A chum who works in the City doing clever things with bonds was given an enormous bonus by his last employer.

In it, he wrote that when he was having lunch with an employee, he “felt overwhelmed by the desire to have an extramarital experience” – which he duly had. I don’t blame it: the company may be boring, but the man isn’t. Reassuring an investor about his health, he said: “I’m single, so I get laid all the time.” He has written a book that makes Alan Clark seem like a model of discretion. I note that Fortune gives much space to this 61-year-old chairman of Progressive Corp, a car insurer based in Cleveland.

I suppose we must have Harvey-Jones and the Troubleshooters – but what about the likes of Cedric Brown, Richard Branson and Sir Richard Greenbury? Think up groups for them, or for anyone else we may have heard of, and you could win yourself a bottle of Bunhill’s fizziest.I BET Peter Benjamin Lewis has sung a few songs in his time. Mr Jenkins says that please, if you want to bump up your bill by pounds 1,000, go to a stockbroker, not him.Buffett on the recordI WAS interested to see that Warren Buffett, the rich American and Sage of Omaha, is joining his cousin Jimmy Buffett on a gramophone record. According to Forbes, he will be playing the ukulele and “singing a bit”. My colleagues were unable to think of a British equivalent, although I could not get the image of Sir John Harvey-Jones bouncing on a trampoline out of my mind.If, however, a tycoon did set up his own popular music ensemble, what would it be called? Buffett and the Billionaires is the easy one. .” the card said.I rang Mr Jenkins and said I was surprised by this bit of advertising “We weren’t too impressed either,” he said “We’re just market makers – we can’t deal in shares. That piece of card has caused chaos here, I can tell you.” It seems that Greenstar’s marketing enthusiasm outpaced its knowledge of the City – it had a share issue in April and thought, logically enough, that satisfied customers might want to buy a bit of it. “Shareholders owning a minimum of 1,000 ordinary shares become members of London’s exclusive Park Lane Director’s Club,” it said, explain- ing that they would then be given discounts when noshing at Greenstar establishments.