HERE’S the latest installment in that long-running story, don’t they ever learn?

Last week, there was astonishment when Gordon Brown, who claimed to be committed to openness and transparency, announced a secret inquiry into the Iraq war. The resultant outcry caused a u-turn.

Yesterday, there was amazement that the new chief executive of RBS is in line for a staggering bonus of £9.6m – this supposedly in the post-bonus world, where greed has gone and where the damage caused by the bonus culture is recognised.

That culture encouraged bankers to take risks which brought short-term gains but left all society vulnerable in the long run.

Even Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin, the former RBS boss whose risk-taking brought his company so low it had to be saved by taxpayers, has performed a uturn by returning £210,000 of his ridiculously huge pension.

Stephen Hester, Sir Fred’s replacement, is to earn a basic annual salary of £1.2m a year from a company that is 70 per cent owned by the taxpayer and that has already shred 9,000 jobs.

Most people will accept that his talents require him to be well paid. It may even be appropriate to reward his successes with modest bonuses.

But it will be obscene if, due to inevitable public spending cuts, schools and hospitals suffer while Mr Hester pockets £9.6m in the years to come, especially as analysts predict he will have to cut a further 20,000 RBS jobs to qualify for it.

How greedy is Mr Hester? Wouldn’t he have been sufficiently motivated by a mere £1m bonus? Does he really need £9m to get his brain working properly? And if he responds so well to filthy lucre, why not bung him £100m to incentivise him to get us out of this mess immediately?

If Mr Hester has a shred of decency, he will be the one who forces the RBS board into a u-turn so that it gives him a renumeration package which is realistic, yet will still be more in a single year than most people will dream of earning in a lifetime of graft.