In the boardroom, on that first morning, I said a sentence out loud that I had been composing in the car.

I said that as of eleven o’clock that morning I was exercising my controlling interest to remove her from the board of Vance Enterprises.

It was an excellent sentence.

My mother went white.

And Peter Nadeau, eight days later, having read the bylaws, explained to me why it was nonsense, and it is worth putting in because it is exactly the sort of thing everybody believes and nobody checks.

A chief executive cannot remove a director.