RUTH SUNDERLAND: Hubris of Post Office’s Paula Vennells

Many issues have modified in my three a long time in monetary journalism. Back within the early days, we used name containers, copy takers, tape recorders and pagers.

Now we supply all that functionality in our pocket – in an iPhone. In my first job, the white warmth of expertise meant clattering on an Amstrad.

By the time Covid struck we might produce a paper from our attics and spare rooms. One factor that has not modified is government scandal and hubris. What has altered is the tempo and amount. We are solely simply into January, and already there have been three bosses within the limelight within the area of lower than every week, for all of the improper causes.

It was a classic 12 months for scandal in 2023, with the CBI, Crispin Odey, BP’s Bernard Looney et al within the shares. If we supply on at this clip, 2024 will outdo all that by Burns Night. The bosses in scorching water started with Paula Vennells, the previous Post Office chief, who’s going through recent calls at hand again her CBE following a TV drama primarily based on the lives of postmasters wrongly accused of theft.

Then got here Sebastien de Montessus, ousted from his job at FTSE 100-listed agency Endeavour Mining, the place he had earned practically £18m in 2021, making him the best paid boss of a blue chip firm that 12 months.

He was accused over an ‘irregular cost’ of practically £5m and a few unrelated allegations about behaviour in direction of colleagues had been thrown in.

Remarks by Sir Howard Davies, the chairman of NatWest, on Radio 4’s Today, to the impact it isn’t that onerous to purchase a home in Britain, could seem a comparatively trivial gaffe.

But of all individuals, he ought to have recognized the hazards of blurting issues out to the BBC, having lately misplaced a chief government as a result of she blabbed particulars of Nigel Farage’s funds to its enterprise editor.

But, as the good American Jazz Age novelist F Scott Fitzgerald may need stated if he had been round as we speak, chief executives and chairmen are completely different from you and me.

They are richer, sure, and extra conceited: as a result of they will afford to be. Paula Vennells is seeing her good title dragged via the mud, as had been the great names of the harmless postmasters.

The distinction is that she is cushioned by wealth and well-equipped to defend herself. She has employed an costly London regulation agency to attempt to salvage her status. Unlike Jo Hamilton – one of many victims who was so afraid of jail she pleaded responsible to against the law she didn’t decide to keep away from a sentence – Vennells won’t need to work as a cleaner to make ends meet. She and her ilk don’t essentially see episodes that will be profession ending for many of us, as something of the type.

Vennells has clung on to her CBE and in addition stayed in profitable directorships at retailers Morrisons and Dunelm even after the Post Office scandal emerged, although she subsequently stepped down. Sir Howard Davies has had mishaps in his profession, most notably on the London School of Economics (LSE). He was director when the LSE accepted a £1.5m donation from the household of the late Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi.

An impartial report discovered him personally liable for among the failures that resulted within the scandal.

Yet a speedy comeback ensued, first as chairman of the UK Airports Commission after which as chairman of RBS/NatWest.

At the start of my profession, government pay and rewards had been solely simply beginning to balloon. This was accompanied by considerations pay would get out of hand, as certainly has been the case. The justification for super-human pay was that these had been distinctive people. In reality, they’re all too fallibly human.