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When you have, as I have, absolutely no qualifications whatsoever, you are generally advised by the DSS to be a journalist or an account manager for an advertising firm.

As they well know, it's pretty much impossible to be either of these things without being paid far less than you would if you simply coasted along on you job seeker's allowance.

So when you're down in the DSS office ticking the boxes necessary for them to stump up the pocket money, you have only to have very vague ambitions as to what they euphemistically call Full Time Employment.

I usually tell my Social Security Officer that I want to be a pictures editor for a newspaper and, since neither of us are sure whether the other one knows what a pictures editor is, she's obliged to apply the appropriate stamp to my form.

I'm going to be a bit more careful about what I say next time, though.

I'd assumed that a pictures editor sat about writing cheques for photographers and pasting in a snappy epithet underneath the grainy telephoto snapshot.

"Sex Beast", "Drugs Romp" or "Accused of Sodomy" or whatever. Or just one of those.

But this week, although there've been the requisite grainy snapshots of Jerome Kerviel, it's been a hell of a job to write the epithet to match.

No one seems to be able to decide what kind of a story this one is.

 

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Rogue Trader Jerome Kerviel: Evil Knievel or hero?

So far as the facts are concerned, there seems to be broad agreement that this French trader lost lots of money whilst futures hedging on European market indices. Prop trading on index futures.

You see the difficulty. It's so very, very bland. 'Plain vanilla' doesn't begin to cover it.

How does one frame this gobbledegook in terms that people can understand?

Nigel Farndale of the Telegraph challenged his readers to "feel indigant about the story'"; he complained that "kiddies weren't fiddled with" and that "lives weren't lost".

There wasn't even any evidence that M Kerviel could be "Accused of Sodomy" either.

SocGen's Chairman suggested that Kerviel was a "terrorist" but got little support from the "papers who seemed unusually unwilling to print 'Kerviel: Links to Al Qu'aeda" in order to sell more copies.

Adam Sage of the Times also whined about how he found it hard to brand the young trader with the kind of description we'd all be able to understand.

Was he an Evil Einstein or a discontented, angry failure, wreaking revenge on a world that ignored him? Surely he must be one or the other?

In the end Mr Sage settled for "fantasist", intimating unspeakable sex-acts alongside a fascinating psychological twistedness.

I like what you've done there, Adam.

I'd like to suggest, though, that Jerome Kerviel's a bit of a hero.

He pulled off a stunt of staggering complexity over an extended period of time which was in itself hugely impressive.

He lost a shit load of French cash - that cheered me somewhat - and didn't just lose his job: he got five of his bosses sacked.

And if there's one thing more deserving of a beating than a City spiv it's a French one.

It's not noble of me, I know, and it's very very juvenile and probably quite irresponsible, but if, God forbid, the dole office ever lined me up for a pictures editorial job, I'd recommend that they replace the grainy shot if Jerome Kerviel with a picture of a French banker jumping out of a sky-scraper, possibly with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
 
And the caption? 'Sail on, cuntyboy.'