RBS chief Stephen Hester: 'I couldn't imagine how intense the spotlight would be' "Even from day one I knew there was going to be a spotlight that I didn't want, but I could never imagine how intense that spotlight would be," he said. I don't like and find sad the intense personal vilification that is part and parcel of the media and political dialogue of this country, not just for Fred [Goodwin, RBS's former chief executive, who was last week stripped of his knighthood], but for people in general. It's been uncomfortable for me in recent days and I don't think it helps us and I feel sad about that. Mr Hester admits that the condemnation saw him flee to an "emotional bunker" that he only now feels comfortable exiting. However, he is not prepared to criticise those who were so willing to attack him, saying that he does not think there was any "maliciousness" in the way he was treated. I have had no feelings of negativism about their motivations. Of course, in the political rough and tumble, it doesn't come out like that and in this case it has damaged RBS and it has damaged me," he says. The challenge for Mr Hester is to put all this behind him as he tries, in his words, to "get the agenda back on to what we need to do at RBS." This agenda already looks large. In the last month he has announced everything from a major restructuring of RBS's investment banking arm to the $7.3bn (£4.6bn) sale of the bank's aircraft leasing business. Two weeks from now will come the bank's full-year results, which are expected to show another loss, but perhaps more importantly for Mr Hester's short-term survival, how well the bank fared in meeting the lending targets set it for last year under the Project Merlin deal with the Government. Despite early sniping that RBS may have fallen short, this is one area where Mr Hester will not accept criticism. Our lending will not be far short of all the other banks combined. There is no bank in this country coming close to punching above their weight in the way we are," he says. Forget Project Merlin and how it's defined - that's damn impressive. People have lost sight of that, they really have. On bonuses and their attendant controversy, he is prepared to be more conciliatory, though he admits that the bank "can never win" on the issue. In times of austerity it's easy to understand why the debate over how the pie is cut becomes more intense. With hindsight, it was a mistake to start with the rewards before we had talked about the accomplishments," he says. On the point of accomplishments, Mr Hester will at the bank's results on February 23 give details for the first time of the goals he set for the bank three years ago and how close he has come to meeting them. Aside from the £600bn reduction in the size of the balance sheet, which Mr Hester says is a greater shrinkage than achieved by any other "bank or country in history," he is also likely to give more details of the progress the lender's continuing operations have made towards hitting their profit targets. For all this, Mr Hester says he has not received "one penny of cash" beyond his "good salary" of £1.2m, though this is unlikely to assuage those, including Labour leader Ed Miliband, who think his pay should be closer to that of a top civil servant than a City banker. For Mr Hester, this is the heart of the problem. On the one hand he recognises the political imperatives that created the situation he and RBS find themselves in, on the other he says the country and its leaders must move beyond them if the bank and the UK are to prosper again. The Government and all of the political parties need to be thinking, 'How do we make Britain successful?' If they do that, politicians have the luxury of dividing a cake that is getting bigger rather than dividing a cake that is getting smaller as is happening here.