WHEN the Offspring were small I belonged to a mother and toddler group, which included among its membership the wife of an investment banker.

He worked for that well-known High Street bank Barclays, the very same institution currently at the centre of a bonuses row.

After a few months the family moved to Switzerland where, I suspect, most British bankers probably wish they could live at the moment.

A mutual friend went to visit them and came back to report that the husband was raking in a ‘telephone number’ salary, which made us wonder what it was he did that made his time so much more valuable than ours.

According to Firstborn’s girlfriend, who was raised in Switzerland, the country tries very hard not to be welcoming to any poor people.

If you are not a Swiss national and find yourself unemployed or facing tough times then you can expect no help from the state.

Property prices there are so horrendous that only the exceedingly rich – and there are quite a few of them – can afford to buy their own houses. Everyone else rents from the exceedingly rich landlords.

And this, of course, is the sort of world inhabited by investment bankers generally. It is a world of property portfolios, private schools, and no poor people, except those cleaning the pool or minding the children. They are completely divorced from the reality of life for those who earn in a year what they make in a week. (It has been calculated that it would take someone on the minimum wage 33 years to earn the bonus of a rescued bank boss.)

And it is why not one of the 24,000 managers at Barclays, whose average pay is £200,000, will think that refusing a bonus is the right thing to do when their bank has reported a fall in profits and all around them there are ordinary people losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills. And why when we see the Government cosying up to the bankers we just know our politicians don’t understand how the other half live.