So often does Ken Feinberg talk about his adherence to “The Statute” that it is a surprise to find the pay tsar is breaking the law. I am tailing him expertly through the streets of Washington DC. We are driving at close to 40mph on the Taft Bridge (named after a president who also had an avowed love for the law). The speed limit is 25mph.

The 64-year-old has been dashing around Washington in the past few weeks, explaining his thinking on bonuses at seminars, on television and in Congress. He has made an impact – the cash element of salaries for the top 25 executives in seven of the companies that have received government bail-outs has been cut by an average of 90 per cent. The move marked his most significant intervention since his appointment earlier this year as the “special master” for executive compensation for companies receiving “exceptional assistance” from the government. This week Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale business professor, writing in The New York Times hailed him as “the Walter Cronkite of mediation or a modern-day King Solomon as an implicitly trusted voice of fairness and judgment”.