Hurrah! At last! Action is finally being taken against fat cats. If all goes well, failed company bosses will no longer be able to walk away with huge pay-offs.

Under a new proposal, directors' contracts would include a clause enabling companies to claw back pay-offs and bonuses made to bosses ousted for poor performance. Bonuses of more than £8m collected by three departing M&S directors and £2m by the Sainsbury chairman who presided over the company's slide from first to third place in the supermarket league, could probably have been stopped under the system.

But where does this overdue reform come from? It's the idea of a leading city investment firm, F& C Asset Management, which is urging companies to adopt it.

The fact that this curb on director greed stems from the business world itself and not the Government surely says just about everything about New Labour? In fact, two years ago a Private Member's Bill with the same aim was quashed by the Government. And yet, of course, in Opposition Labour used its (false) outrage over the fat cat pay-outs as a lever to gain power.

Any Tories out there? Do you know that David Cameron, the new, young (39-year-old) favourite to lead the party out of the wilderness, belongs to White's, a London club that doesn't admit women even as guests? So, like Nicotine Ken for other reasons, he rules himself out as a leader fit for the 21st century.

The dedication of a sundial at Bowes Museum to the Queen Mother again reminds me of a marvellous epigram by Hilaire Belloc.

I am a sundial and I make a botch

Of what's done far better by a watch.

And his subject was a conventional gnomon sundial, not an incomprehensible globe like the one thought appropriate for the Queen Mother. Simpler would have been better.

As an example of life imitating art it was just about as good as it gets. Fans of PG Wodehouse are rejoicing in the parallels between the appearance of Yorkshire vicar-turned-author Graham Taylor at a school in Cornwall, where the pupils were ordered out after he used words like "bum", "crap" and "fart", and a hilarious episode in a Jeeves story, known as Gussie Presents The Prizes.

Wooster's fellow Drone, Augustus Fink-Nottle, is the speaker at the prizegiving at Market Snodbury Grammar School. His drink laced beforehand by Bertie, he calls the head a silly ass for mis-pronouncing his name, asks one of the prizewinners if he is married, hands over a book with the comment "It looks rather bilge to me,'' describes the winner of the Scripture Prize as "Just the sort of tick who would'', and hints at an affair between this pupil's mother and the headmaster.

Of course the hall is in uproar. Very similar to the Taylor gig, of which the headmistress reported: "At the encouragement of Mr Taylor, the children became, not unnaturally, excitable''. Where she marched them out, Wodehouse's head ordered the playing of the national anthem. In these less patriotic days, that would have provoked more "excitement''.

If you haven't read Gussie Presents The Prizes do so at once. A highlight of the novel Right Ho, Jeeves, it is a finer pick-you-up than any available through the doctor.