There is one respect in which Mr Cable is wielding something of a stick, which is that he wants a prohibition on executives of one company sitting on the remuneration committees of another company: he thinks that high pay is institutionalised by the presence on these remuneration committees of executives with an interest in keeping the pay benchmark as high as possible.

BBC: Will highly paid investors curb pay of highly paid bosses?

"He also treated everybody with respect and treated the other side with respect and listened, which is something that not a lot of us do in politics today, " he said.

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