Sir Peter and Sir Iain: The knights who say "Please?"

Greedy investors - which means most of them - want both.

How come these two top-level British execs are attracting so much ire?

It could be what they've done to BT's share price. At the turn of the century, stock was changing hands for £15 a throw. Now £15 buys three shares.

But the share price has been falling for over a year. Why call for heads to roll now?

Could it be the latest downgrading of BT's credit rating? Could it be the series of failed alliances, scuppering its feeble plays to be a global power? Or how about the failure to float a wireless division and Yell before markets went sour?

Probably not. Bonners and Vallers didn't make the telco market go soft. They bought those 3G licences, but they'd have picked up their P45s long ago if they hadn't.

It might be the DSL thing. Sir Iain and Sir Peter have hardly been going after the Holy Grail of Broadband Britain with legendary zeal, and the un-dynamic duo have attracted more venom on these pages for this than anything else.

But in a global game with £30bn stakes, a couple of DSL lines here and there equals small potatoes.

Here's the real reason. The two knights have to go to the shareholders, who are busy kicking themselves for having spent so much money on increasingly worthless shares, and try and sell them - you guessed it - more shares.

The institutions must shell out. Otherwise terrible things will happen: they'll lose even more money. But they can't bear to give that money without some acknowledgement of their pain. They want a human sacrifice. Ideally, two.

But sacrifices are not business logic. They may make investors feel better as they sign cheques, but won't help BT one iota. There's not exactly a string of telco talent queuing up outside the door, and what sane man would want the top job anyway?

Stringing up the captain when the ship is sinking isn't going to calm the seas or plug the leaks in the hull. Sir Iain and Sir Peter, for all their faults, are still the best knights for the job.

There - the unthinkable has happened. silicon.com has written nice things about Sir Peter Bonfield. Can we have our DSL lines now, please?