As the dark clouds gather over the City regulator’s Canary Wharf den, following the damning Davis Report, one cannot help but wonder why one of the most important aspects of the sorry saga of a senior executive from the FCA having secret meetings with a Fleet Street journalist has been ignored.
The focus of the terms of reference of the Davis Inquiry has been on the price sensitivity of any news story on life offices as a result of that clandestine meeting.
This is a legitimate concern for the FCA, given its brief on the Listing Code, but it is by far not the only public interest concern.
The City regulator is a public body and there is a deep-seated principle that no part of the public sector should be having so-called off the record briefings with the press; at least this is what the Leveson Inquiry was meant to put a stop to.
This principle of transparency, fairness and openness was once the foundation of public sector public relations - details are either on the record for all, or off the record to all.
However, the principle has been corrupted over the last decade and a half by a number of developments in politics and policymaking and in particular the rise of so-called Spads – special advisers.
Spads are people with no appreciation of public ethics, without loyalty to the civil service or wider society; in fact, quite often not even to any political party, but to a single politician on whose wings they hope to rise and make their names and fortunes.
They are, as a tribe, highly unethical and will think very little of destroying the reputation of a supposed rival, using their favourite weapon, character assassination through the press.
It is behaviour that feeds on the journalistic myth of the ‘exclusive’. As Peter Wright, former editor of the Mail on Sunday once said, so-called exclusives rarely add to the commercial success of a publication, and almost never to its reputation for quality journalism.
Some reporters, who get an advanced copy of a press release now described such as an exclusive, even though the press release was meant for public distribution in any case.
And, in the case of the Daily Telegraph and the senior executives of the FCA, there is a small dividing line between such behaviour and the corruption of foreign politicians.
Public sector press officers must be like Caesar’s wife and must treat the entire media – press, broadcasting and digital – with equal fairness and respect.
It is not only unethical, but should be a disciplinary offence for a public sector press officer to favour one publication over another; BBC Panorama should not be given access to information that a local paper will never be considered for.
This is not a naïve suggestion: I spent years working on a mass circulation publication that once used parts of the public sector as if they were attached to the newspaper’s library. I have had my fair share of ‘exclusives’ out of such relationships.
The private sector is different and press officers working for commercial businesses have a right, indeed a duty, to talk to whichever sector of the media they choose.
That senior FCA officials should not be caught in dark holes talking to chosen sectors of the press is obviously wrong, but that the non-executive directors of the City regulators should omit this angle from the terms of reference for the David Inquiry is something that should be put right.
