Too embarrassed to admit they’re paid way more than the rest of us

I was in the chamber, reporting for this very newspaper, when Henry McLeish announced his shock resignation as first minister after only a year in post. He had got into a bit of a muddle with his office expenses.

A friend of mine disrupted the passage of the controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill when she raised her skirt in protest, exposing the merkin she had made from scraps in her craft box. And the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds led to a special, and very heated, sitting of the Scottish Parliament.

But nothing had prepared me for Peter Mathieson, principal of Edinburgh University, who appeared in front of Holyrood’s education committee last week to explain his plans to make £140 million in cuts to the university’s budget – including a £90m saving on salaries.

Pressed by Tory MSP Douglas Ross to reveal his own salary, Sir Peter stunned the room when he said he didn’t know. “I don’t carry that figure around in my head,” he said.

Now, let’s pause there for a moment. One of the most prominent people in Scottish civic life, the head of an ancient university with a global reputation, a man responsible for the education of nearly 50,000 students a year, doesn’t know how much he earns.

Douglas Ross came to his rescue, pointing out to the hapless principal that his salary, including pension benefits, is about £418,000 year. He could also have mentioned Sir Peter’s four-storey townhouse, paid for by the university, and various other perks, including an annual allowance for his energy bills and for entertaining.

Before his career as a university administrator, Sir Peter was a distinguished medical researcher who focused on autoimmune renal diseases – a profession which surely requires a keen eye for detail. How can he not know how much he earns? And I bet my annual state pension (£11,973 for 2024/25) that if you stopped ten people at random on Princes Street and asked them what they earned last year, all ten would be able to tell you, almost to the penny.

In the real world, people are struggling to pay their own energy bills, make their mortgage or rental payments every month and keep the weekly supermarket shop on budget. We have to know exactly how much we earn, because every pound matters.

Sir Peter Mathieson personifies the social divide in this country, where a small but very influential group of people are so divorced from real life that they don’t need to know how much they earn, they just know it’s a lot more than the rest of us. And many of them, like Sir Peter, are public servants – their inflated salaries paid for by the rest of us. NHS bosses with six-figure pay packets and gold-plated pensions. Quango chiefs on more than £300,000 annually. Even backbench MSPs earn £74,500 a year. Meanwhile, a social care worker is lucky if she earns more than £20,000. I don’t think Sir Peter “forgot” how much he earned. I think he was too embarrassed to publicly admit that he is paid way over the odds.