We're all in this together..

The financial crisis is a time for us all to tighten our belts and share in the pain. Isn't it? Not apparently at the Daily Mail and General Trust.

First news reaches us of Paul Dacre raking in a tidy £1.63m last year - just one of five directors earning more than £1m. Dacre's basic salary - if £1.13m can be called basic - rose 3% (nice work if you can get it) and he received a cash allowance for his pension as well as help towards his accommodation and benefits in kind. If only MPs could get such allowances. His pension now stands at a cool £583,000 a year. MPs have a lot to learn from greedy pigs like Dacre.

But even Dacre's whopping wad is but mere lose change to Padraic Fallon, the group's highest paid director who received £3.46m. Viscount Rothermere had to make do with an 87.4% rise in his pay to £1.32m.

Meanwhile over at the Leicester Mercury - also owned by the DMGT subsidiary Northcliffe - the prize for the crassest seasonal email goes to editor Keith Perch who managed to offend virtually the entire newsroom by lamenting the cuts and axing of around 50 journalists from the group's staff and ending with the following 'joke' - what's the definition of optimism? A regional newspaper journalist ironing five shirts on a Sunday.

Still. Just remember. We're all in this together...