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Time and time and time again we are reminded that the institutions still invariably hold us all in contempt, whilst helping prop up a state which merrily helps itself to our hard-earned taxes.

Great artists, from Shakespeare to Dickens, have gone down in posterity as lampooners of bankers, accountants and the law. They weren’t wrong then, and they are not necessarily wrong now.

That’s a sweeping generalisation, of course. There are many honourable men in banking, accountancy, finance and the law who would object, rightly, to such criticism.

But it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for an institutional system which seems to encourage bureaucracy, prevarication, obsessive paper-shuffling and all manner of self-serving smoke and mirror tactics principally designed to drag matters out at the expense of the poor consumer.

I put in a call this week to check if the iSoft affair had finally been put to bed.

For the uninitiated, iSoft became a byword in Birmingham and further afield for a financial morass.

The late Roger Dickens, one of the West Midlands’ most accomplished business leaders who died tragically early at just 58 in 2006, was one of the co-founders of the software group, which became one of the hottest stocks of the technology boom back in the early 2000s.

To cut a long story short, iSoft found itself at the heart of a national accountancy scandal, although Roger Dickens resigned as chairman before the Financial Services Authority found evidence of irregularities in 2004 and 2005. iSoft had to restate its accounts by £174 million and several executives resigned.