No denying, it's tough times for newspapers right now. And some of them are facing the dilemma of whether they take a positive or a negative stance on the issue of bonuses in the city.

For some years prior to the 2007 credit crunch they had been tireless in their support for multi-million dollar end of year bonuses, claiming that this was the price of attracting the brightest and the best to London. It was claimed that any attempt to regulate would naturally create a brain drain, as well as deprive the wider economy of the drickle down effect of the bankers' ample spending.

Post 2007, the same papers were outraged at how irresponsible banks had been in paying these outlandish bonuses, based as they were on high risk strategies that subsequently brought the economy to its knees. Phrases such as 'casino capitalism' were common on the pages of all the papers - liberal and conservative.

Now the climate is changing once again, and no one wants to read the market wrong. "Christ!" said one financial columnist to me, off the record of course, "If the bonus-bearing bankers are back and they are here to stay, none of us lot want to be on the wrong side of them. One of the best weekends I ever had was on the yacht of a certain head of credit derivatives from one of the top US banks. If these guys are back with a vengeance, then, hey, it's not our job to judge them. Right?"