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Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » Listening to the Today Programme earlier this week reminded me of an article I wrote for this fine publication last year about the Eurovision Song Contest and how juries were to be brought back, though sadly too late to persuade Wogan to narrate this year's shenanigans. Now pay attention, dear reader. It wasn't really about Eurovision. It was about how, when we focus on short term gain, we can lose sight of the longer term objectives.
And this several months before the Lehman Brothers calamity and all that followed.
It was the interview of Yvette Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, by John Humphrys that got this particular train of thought started. Yvette Cooper was making fairly typical rabble-rousing comments surrounding the payment of bonuses to our friends at the nation's banks. The revelation was that, even though about 25% of these bonus payments are actually more a form of salary, since they are not actually performance-related and are a matter of contract, Cooper seemed to be suggesting that the banks consider whether they can get out of paying them.
Sorry, that should be: the banks should examine their legal obligations to pay these bonuses very carefully. Because the Government can't encourage people to breach contracts. Obviously. And that the bankers to whom the compulsory 'bonuses' are to be paid to should search their conscience as to deciding whether to accept those payments.
All fairly run-of-the-mill and only routinely annoying. After all, lest we forget, we all enjoyed the credit boom. Even me, despite the misgivings expressed in the Eurovision article. And even more especially, our political lords and masters ("no more boom and bust" and all that), who were quite happy to sit back and take the credit, be they Labour or Conservative. So attempting to lay all the blame off on these scapegoats is no more than the politics of convenience. Obviously, where bonuses are performance-related, I would personally require some convincing as to whether the specified criteria have been met. But those compulsory payments are simply salary increments and if I was a banker awaiting such a payment, my reaction would be that I would take the money and search my conscience in the less than totally unlikely event that I receive a redundancy notice.
But what really irritated me was the second part of the interview, which concerned the treatment of the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's expense claims concerning her 'primary' residence in London, owned by her sister, and her second home out of London. Yvette Cooper had faced her own inquiry and was keen to stress that she had been cleared by the independent parliamentary commissioner who led the investigation. She stressed that neither she nor Jacqui Smith had broken the rules. The rules that are set by MPs. (And let's not forget that these are the same people that narrowly failed to exempt their records from Freedom of Information Act requests.)
Er... hello? Are they joking? Am I the only one to spot just the barest glimpse of hypocrisy here? Perhaps the tactic adopted by the spin masters within the Labour ranks (and don't by any means, think that I'm siding with the opposition here - just about all of them are as bad) is that if they make it so glaringly and blatantly obvious, nobody will notice. I think that's what Jack Bauer would call "hiding in plain sight".
As irritated as I was about this exchange, I am at least satisfied in one thing. The interview ended with Yvette Cooper admonishing Humphys in a light hearted manner for misleading his listeners. Humphys plainly didn't find it amusing and the involuntary grunt from him that signalled the end of the interview I suspect was ringing in Cooper's ears for some time thereafter. If I was her, I'd avoid interviews on the Today Programme for a while.
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