Erikka Askeland: Walsh will not be losing any sleep over Cable's view of his pay takeoff

WHAT will Vince Cable, who emerged as the scourge of corporate fat cats everywhere at the CBI conference this week, think of Willie Walsh's new remuneration package when the chief executive of BA takes over as head of a bigger, merged airline? And should Walsh care what the Business Secretary thinks?

Cable set the business community's teeth on edge with dark hints he aimed to review the vast gulf between the pay of workers and that of their chief executives.

According to investor documents produced ahead of the BA/Iberia merger in January, Walsh will get a 12 per cent pay rise to 825,000 a year when he becomes the top man at the new International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG). This does not include a potential bonus pot of up to 1.65m.

Keith Williams, BA's chief financial officer who gets a promotion to BA chief executive after the merger, gets an even better pay rise - 43 per cent to 630,000. Albeit this is lower than what Walsh is currently being paid.

Walsh's hefty pay packet might stick in the craw of BA's union, Unite, which has been engaged in a bitter dispute on behalf of 10,000 BA cabin crew. The staff are currently mulling a revised offer the airline made last week, but the industrial action has been long running and nasty. BA's reinstatement of travel perks for striking staff last week was a sign relations were thawing, but there is little love for Walsh who has a long way to go before staff morale is back on an even keel.

But Walsh has been canny. His pay rise come January will be his first in two years since his salary was frozen. And Walsh also took the unusual step of giving up a month's salary when he asked his staff to do the same - although critics suggested it was not as if his family would have to eat beans on toast to tide them over.

The airline insists that the pay levels have been set to "reflect the market rate for a company with similar market capitalisations and turnover". But the pay is unlikely to take in poorer aspects of BA's performance. Let's not forget the common jibe that BA is not much more than a flying pension deficit - last measured at a whopping 3.7bn. Or that it has suffered record losses over the past two years - although tomorrow the firm is expected to announce a return to profit.

What Cable aims to address is the fact that chief executives of the UK's 100 largest companies earned 81 times the average pay for full-time workers in 2009, compared with 47 times in 2000. But how he will address it, no one quite yet knows. So, really, what he thinks about Walsh's pay package amounts to not much more that hot air.

But as Cable reminded us, even Richard Lambert, the outgoing head of the CBI, thinks senior executives are at risk of looking like "aliens" if their pay makes them seem to fly too high over the average lowly staffer.Nor should this worry Walsh. He has shown, in his tenure leading one of Britain's biggest but rather troubled firms, he is indeed a strange creature from a planet where the local species have brass necks.

'David' may have backed down but still has Goliaths in sights

THE battle over the Woolies brand has certain David versus Goliath feel to it. On one side is the Mark Newton-Jones, the well-fed chief executive of home shopping giant Shop Direct which bought the Woolworth.co.uk brand from receivers in 2009. In sandals with a sling is the feisty mother-of-two, Claire Robertson, who became a sort of folk heroine when she revived her failed local Dorchester Woolies as Wellworths, saving 20 jobs and making a profit in her first year to boot.

But big, bad Newton-Jones has forced the former Woolies store manager to give up the Wellworths name in a confidential settlement. Instead, she'll have to call her store Wellchester.

But sweet as the 35-year-old from Yeovil may seem, Robertson shouldn't be dismissed or patronised as some babe in the corporate woods. Her side admit that Newton-Jones was initially minded to let them keep the name, but changed it when he realised Robertson wasn't limiting her ambitions to merely flogging pick'n'mix and household goods from one store. Instead, Robertson has rather giantess-scale ambitions for a retail empire stretching across south and south-west England.

Robertson might even take it as a compliment that Shop Direct is taking her competitive threat so seriously. She certainly won't be the first entrepreneur to have worked their way up to the top from the shop floor. And she will still be able to call her stores "Wellies", the nickname she wanted to see associated with her venture.

Yet perhaps she missed a trick, too. She could have argued the Wellworths name was instead associated with a former chain of shops in Northern Ireland. The money behind Robertson - and owner of the Wellworths brand - is a little known Irish businessman, Robert Power. And power he seems to be if he's aiming to back Robertson, the hero of the piece and now a genuine media darling loved by her customers.

Newton-Jones insists he is merely protecting the value of the brand he bought, and in the face of such potential competition, he is quite right to fight back against what may have once seemed a barrage of small harmless stones.