Even bankers must join the flight from excess

It was Ross's pursuit of the record pay packet and the BBC's willingness to give it to him, said the ex-intimate, that went to his head.

Instead of apologising when the row about the prank calls to Andrew Sachs started, Ross said he would deal with it on his own TV show. As it is, Ross's programme, due to be aired tonight, has been canned and its £6 million a year host suspended.

But the reason for much of the venom directed at the floppy-haired presenter is not because of what he and Russell Brand said on Sachs's answering machine: it's down to his earnings and his attitude towards them. This is a man who is on a three-year package worth £18 million and who responded to critics by claiming to be "worth 1,000 BBC journalists".

What might have been meant as a witty remark has returned to haunt him. For the second time in two weeks, Britain is venting its new loathing of excess. The onset of recession is bringing with it a discernible shift away from conspicuous consumption.

What was acceptable or at least tolerated in the past is no longer likely to be so. Indeed, a positive is likely to emerge from the crisis we're in one of greater appreciation and humility.

Until then, there will be furores and scandals to endure. The first such row was over Peter Mandelson, George Osborne and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska: what caused such offence wasn't so much the accounts of the cosiness between the two politicians and the controversial tycoon but the flaunting of wealth that was entailed. The pictures of Deripaska's luxurious giant yacht and Technicolor descriptions of the super-rich at play in Corfu stuck in many craws.

Other examples of a switch to discretion abound. Net-a-porter, the luxury fashion website, has begun offering Londoners the option of having their purchases delivered in unbranded brown paper bags for fear of upsetting the natives.

It's no idle threat: in Sardinia this summer, Flavio Briatore, the flamboyant Formula 1 and QPR boss, and his glamorous friends, were pelted with wet sand by holidaymakers as they disembarked from a yacht to go to lunch in a beach restaurant.

The Italian newspaper La Stampa seized on the episode: "From north to south, the rebellion against those who show off their money and power is growing."

Sir Ronald Cohen, millionaire founder of private equity giant Apax and close friend of Gordon Brown, has warned: "Entrepreneurial economies which have high rates of growth and high rates of job creation do lead to great divergences in wealth. When economic situations get bad, it takes a spark to ignite a violent reaction."

There's no doubt the worsening economy has brought with it a hardening of the public mood. But the anger goes deeper than mere jealousy on the part of the have-nots: there is a growing body of opinion that blames the rich and their friends in the City and on Wall Street for the predicament in which society now finds itself.

In this country, the Prime Minister has said as much when he pointed an accusing finger at the greed of the bankers for causing the credit crunch. It's not the policies of him or his colleagues, he says, that are responsible but the reckless lending, lack of control and wild speculating of the money men.

So far, judging by his increased poll rating, the counter-charge that he fuelled the credit boom by indulging in careless spending and needless government borrowing himself has not stuck. The lamentable failure of the Tories to land a telling blow on Brown's handling of the economy has paved the way: the City is guilty as charged.

The peasants are revolting and their danders are well and truly up. It's their jobs that are at risk, their pensions that are suffering, their house prices that have slumped. More directly, it's their taxes that are being used to bail out the banks, their hard-earned cash that is saving the swanky companies that paid out millions in bonuses and, incredibly, continue to do so.

The bankers' blinkered hubris never ceases to amaze. You might think that this year of all years, Goldman Sachs might forgo its annual round of making chosen staff up to partner, allowing them access to the bank's elite earnings pool.

This, after all, is the same bank that has had to eat humble pie and concede its status as a pure investment bank and accept deposits in order to secure US state protection and is receiving a £6.1 billion lifeline from the US Treasury.

But no, it has set aside £7 billion for salaries and year-end bonuses. Each of the firm's 443 partners should pocket a Christmas handout of £3 million. And there are 94 new ones, several of them in London. The bank argues that this is the lowest number of promotions since 2002 but in the eyes of its legion of emboldened critics, that's 94 too many.

Even for out-of-step Goldman Sachs the party may soon come to an end. In a move that was unthinkable previously, the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has written to Goldman Sachs and eight other major US banks demanding information on how they intend to pay bonuses, warning that payments by under-capitalised firms could prove to be illegal.

We're not just entering recession, we're beginning an age where thrift will be the mantra either that or, as some predict, there will be trouble. The longer that firms like Goldman Sachs don't get it, the greater their risk.

In his seminal work, The Great Crash 1929, the US economist John Kenneth Galbraith explores the way society turned on the bankers. He makes the point that it's not as if they were unpopular but when the crisis erupted, their popularity counted for nothing. "There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented.

But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini, will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities. Such was the fate of the bankers."

For bankers read politicians who hob-nob with Russian oligarchs. For them too, read Jonathan Ross. Greed, most definitely, is no longer good.