Okay, let me just check.

Iain Duncan Smith is still in his job, right? Yep. Mark Thompson? Yes, him too. Chris Patten? Still present and correct. So let me get this straight. You can be running a government department trying to initiate a £4.2bn shake-up of the benefits system which has been the subject of a damning National Audit Office report claiming "weak management, ineffective control and poor governance" (and the small matter of wasting £34m in the process) and what do you do? If you're Iain Duncan Smith you blame your staff.

You can have been the former Director General of the BBC under whose watch golden handshakes amounting to almost £3m of licence payers money - that's £3m over and above what you were contractually obliged to pay - were made. Or you can be the chairman of the BBC Trust, the man whom one might presume should have been on top of such payments, and tell the Commons public accounts committee this week that you didn't get "forensic" level of detail about the £1m pay-off given to one former DG. Umm, shouldn't you have asked for it, Mr Patten?

Frankly doesn't this all sound like that old criticism regularly levelled against newspapers? Power without responsibility. You take the big wages. You take the title, but heaven forfend you actually let yourself be held accountable when things go wrong.

For the last few years the Coalition Government - and no one more than the Work and Pensions Secretary -has been making much of tackling what it sees as a "something for nothing" culture. But doesn't it seem that it's rather less keen to tackles such abuses when they happen at the top of the tree rather than at the bottom?

For years the City has been telling us that we have to pay the financial top dogs top dollars or else they would take their top skills elsewhere. Now remind me. How did that work out? Oh yes, in an unprecedented financial collapse across Europe that saw us all having to bail out the banks and then see public services cut to ribbons by a government trying to balance the books in return.

In Iain Martin's new book Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men who Blew Up the British Economy, the author reveals the former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin was more interested in micro-managing office hygiene and Christmas card designs than worrying about the dangers of aggressive, unsustainable expansion. The result a collapse that required the government to effectively renationalise the bank (or 80% of it anyway).

Mr Goodwin at least got his books in the end. But the fact is the same macho, irresponsible management is still at work in Britain today. Last month the Co-op Group - the Co-op, for God's sake - revealed £790m losses in the first half of the year, largely as a result of a £559m loss in the banking arm, which was hit by a £496m bad debt charge. The bank also revealed that without an emergency injection of capital, including £1bn from the Co-Op, it would no longer be viable as a going concern. The reason. Toxic loans. That and the bank's plans for growth which included the attempted purchase of 630 Lloyds branches earlier this year. Note that. Earlier this year. That means the same kind of macho expansionist mindset that did for banks in 2008 was still at work in 2013.

The Co-op has a new group chief executive by the way. Euan Sutherland is the man who has to sort this mess out. Wonder how many Co-op staff might lose their jobs in the process?

What we have in Britain is an executive culture that has absorbed the City's line on executive pay across the board and, you might argue, its disinclination to own up when it's made a Horlicks of things.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, zero-hour contracts are on the rise, pension funds have been slashed, sick pay is being squeezed, long hours culture is endemic and there is a growing reliance on unpaid interns. It is said around 100,000 young people may be working for no pay in the UK and 100 companies are being investigated by HMRC for allegedly breaching minimum wage laws. That's something for nothing all right.