Trivially, it’s worth mentioning that the ex cathedra utterances of Charles Wheeler were in their way as crushingly orthodox as those of James Cameron, that even more famous and worshipped lefty. Too many of us were steamrollered by their brand of liberalism. Let’s have no golden-ageism here please.

I am not inclined to take lessons on media seriousness from Alastair Campbell, whose own persona I do hugely enjoy, in a sleb way. He was part of the process of reducing politics to gossip. And anyway, I think we have a more serious, more substantial, more substantiated, media now than ever we did. To take one example, The Times has more slebbiness than it used, but no more than is necessary to draw in a female audience to its rather serious material.

I imagine The Times’s quotient of gossip is no worse or larger than in any organ of 18th Century journalism.

More importantly, I am a too-lately admirer of Joseph Addison. I have my late father’s battered copy of the essays by my bedside now. I can say that Addison’s, “The Royal Exchange” (if that is the source of Dr Calcutt’s Addisonian adumbrations) does not really say or imply that trade improves morals, though any self-respecting supporter of capitalism believes it does. Rather, it seems more in the manner of the economist (as opposed to the moralist) Adam Smith in saying that trade produces a miracle of specialist co-operation across trades, climates and nations. Yes, Addison does say that this is a peaceable and amiable process, and yes, he has the idea of a “citizen of the world”, but the improvement he sees in all this is material more than moral. I may be wrong, but I think you need to get to later thinking (Hayek, David Landes, and now Matt Ridley) to get the full-on idea that trade generates the class of co-operation which is the conduit of intellectual and moral exchange.

I dimly recall being taught that “commonality” is a Marxist idea, along with its better-known stablemate, alienation. Anyway and whatever, I don’t buy this bit of Dr Calcutt’s case either.

Indeed, we do need an explanation of why the media is more excited by ordinary (and only notionally “illicit”) sex than by murder these days. I don’t think we’ll find it in Marxist theory. See below for a stab at an explanation.

On the appetite for news in general, I’d recommend going back to Addison. His “The Newspaper” is a brilliant account of the way the medium is the message: create the means of disseminating new gossip, and people will become addicted to it. But even hard, serious news has always been information which someone is prepared to pay for. And nowadays, frankly, the supply has outrun the demand. Or, more precisely, the organs of dissemination are multiplying like crazy, and they all have the same sources. What’s worse, almost all news-makers can publish their own information: the organs of the media are becoming more and more obviously derivative. No wonder the media complains the business model for serious journalism is broken. No wonder they seek to stay afloat by being better at showbusiness than their many rivals.

And here I think Dr Calcutt is on the right track (Marxist or not).  I think we like celebrity stuff because we want to prey on the privacy of famous people. I mean that just as we once liked to fantasise that we were hacking at the bodies of the Ripper’s victims, we now want to hack at the souls of poor Brittney or Giggs. I like this sort of account because it is, I think, more spiritual and sound than any cod-Marxist account is likely to be. We think celebrities have made a Faustian pact with us, and when they falter in any way, we want to inflict pain on them as best we can. It isn’t pretty, but it’s human alright. It’s a bloodsport for readers.

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Lindsey Hilsum

Campbell issued this warning at the University of Westminster, following a short ceremony in which the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism – in memory of the distinguished BBC correspondent who died in 2008 – was presented by his widow, Lady Dip Wheeler, to Channel 4 News reporter Lindsey Hilsum. In her acceptance speech, Hilsum remembered a time when Wheeler had praised her reporting and she ‘walked on air’ for days afterwards. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, Hilsum’s reputation rests on coverage of world historic events.

The event was attended by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who arrived late.

The Charles Wheeler Award not only recalls its eponymous hero, it also calls up journalism’s preferred image of itself – humane and high-minded, accurate and analytical. Wheeler himself really did embody these qualities: he took accountability to the public so seriously that even in retirement this world-renowned reporter had himself openly listed in the London phonebook as ‘Wheeler, Charles: Journalist’.

Meanwhile, on the streets outside the award ceremony, the day’s headlines added strength to Campbell’s dire warning.

Charles Wheeler

The biggest-selling morning papers had led with further personal details about ‘sex cheat’ Ryan Giggs. The Manchester United footballer was said to have undergone follicular replacement therapy following stress-related hair loss.

Later in the day, the London Evening Standard plumped for the personal presence of Mayor Boris Johnson at a police drugs raid in Tottenham – this made the front page. When a suspected drug dealer awoke to find the Mayor of London in his flat, along with police officers, he is reported to have said: ‘What the f*** are you doing here?’

‘I don’t think this chap was pleased to see me’, the Mayor later said. But Johnson must have been pleased that his celebrity status was affirmed by media coverage associating him with decisive police action.

We once thought Ryan Giggs led a passive sex life; but it is none of our business either way

The hairs on Giggsy’s head were headline news. Imagine the front page splash (and the follow-up pages inside) if CSI-style reporters had bagged the pubes from his mistresses’ beds! But the forensic fetish for personality goes way beyond philandering footballers and their ‘wagms’ (‘m’ added for mistresses). It extends to public officials such as Johnson, now known much less for their politics and far more for their personal presentation (in BoJo’s case, the mop of tousled, blond hair which says ‘public school but people-friendly’).

The way his hair is distressed is BoJo’s mode of address: I’m half-way between Hugh Grant and Ron Weasley, and it just so happens I head-up the government of London. Celebrity is the medium, there’s not much message besides, and many journalists seem happy to carry it – the lighter the better.

BoJo is an “hairlarious” politician

In the same vein, subsequent press coverage of the Charles Wheeler Award ceremony featured the banter between the two biggest celebrities in the room. From the stage, Campbell joshed Johnson for arriving late and for going out early on the drugs raid.  Though dedicated to the public role of journalism, even this event was partly colonised by the media-bred, scandal-fed, all-embracing, self-referencing cult of personality.

So Campbell’s warning could not have been more timely; and when I heard him issue it, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit. Charismatic, too, even if his claret and blue is a wrong ‘un (Burnley instead of West Ham).

Recognising that journalism’s recent regression is relative rather than absolute, Campbell used the same phrase which I had made use of in an academic conference the day before: British journalists are defaulting to ‘a new centre of gravity’ (my conference paper proves prior usage). He called upon journalists to re-discover what they are for – as I and my colleagues have done in Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org , and again in the recently published book Journalism Studies: a critical introduction. He even agreed with my proposition (I know this because I asked him) that journalists should stand up and say: Giggsy, celebrity, even (for the time being) the ‘question of privacy’ – it’s all sheer follicles! These are non-events, they should be non-stories, and we just have to drop ‘em and go after the ones that matter.

So Mr Campbell and I agreed on four of journalism’s famous Ws: who should do what, where and when. But we parted company on the fifth. Why the compulsive downshifting to molecular celebrity? Campbell came back on this question with the 2Ts answer: time and technology. As he sees it, new media technology drives journalists to churn stuff out all the time, so they have no time to do anything else. But this is like saying that politicians are overtaken by events: it’s true and it’s a truism, with no explanatory power.

Yes, journalists under time pressure will stay within existing tramlines, but that does nothing to explain why tracking celebrity has become the line to follow. Furthermore, it’s by no means certain that online journalists are generating content more rapidly than, say, Harold Evans sitting under the clock at the subs’ desk of the Manchester Evening News, writing and re-writing reports of the 1952 Harrow train crash for successive print editions.

Even if there really is more new stuff today (rather than different ways of cutting up the same old), why should journalism’s expansion have to end in journalism-lite? We might have expected more to mean heavier.

Alastair Campbell had Tony Blair's ear

Though criticising journalism for its default mechanism, Campbell himself was defaulting to technological determinism, which alongside environmental determinism and the new neurological determinism, now constitutes the centre of gravitas on why people do/should not do the things they do. This is a silly place for intelligent people to find themselves in, though not because it contains elements of determinism. Anyone who thinks we simply make our own history must have lost sight of the circumstances we didn’t choose – to coin a phrase. The problem is one of misattribution: the wrong sources (digital media, brain chemistry, the Earth) are being identified as determining factors; and dodgy determinisms such as these can only have a damaging effect on the subjective, collective determination to raise our game.

It’s socially determined, stupid!

Instead of technology, neurology and nature, the following, brief episodes – flashes from the history of news – are intended to show that journalism has been socially determined; and so too is our capacity to change its centre of gravity. Revealing the real elements of compulsion can only make the case for concerted change more compelling.

‘News’ – to be distinguished from something which has happened, that happens to be new – has various preconditions, one of which is the position from which to report it. This position was fully established 300 years ago in the merchant city of London, where it was personified in the Spectator magazine, co-edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Lloyd’s Coffee-House

In an enormous variety of essays on all aspects of city life, Addison was consistently striving to establish standards of behaviour. The deliberately self-regarding style of his essays reflected new manners and morals, and the Spectator helped to compose well-mannered deliberation into a whole way of life for the emerging bourgeois class. If such refinement seems far removed from the rough and tumble of eighteenth century markets, with fortunes lost and found as tides turned and ships went down to the bottom, it turns out that Addison identified the London Exchange (one of the city’s leading markets) as the most uplifting place in the world. For Addison, valuating commodities and evaluating human behaviour were one and the same habit of mind.

In their mind’s eye, members of his mercantile milieu habitually met at an agreed point of comparison, from which to carry out a continuously comparative study of the world’s worth. Their valuations applied to people as much as things; and their meeting place was also the starting point for a new approach to common values – moral as well as commercial.

To arrive at their shared position, London’s traders were obliged to divest themselves of some personal interests, while investing something of themselves in the creation of common interests, or the public interest. Commonality such as this can only be an abstraction from strictly personal existence; yet it also materialised in London’s eighteenth century coffee houses and in the publications that these traders went there to read. Thus the first, fully fledged reporter, standing aside from particular interests and standing in for the common interest, was called into existence by the unstinting gaze of the merchant. Eighteenth century London had to have its own embodiment of this combination. In the form of the Spectator, founded in 1711, the merchant city acquired the press it deserved.

Professional journalism’s obsession with murder

With hindsight, it appears that the Spectator was a reporter in slow motion: he had the time to compose essays at a time when, relatively speaking, every day was a slow news day. In the 1900s, two centuries later, journalism was already 200 times faster. Not because the associated technology was so very different (nota bene, Alastair Campbell); instead, the whole world was turning like never before.

Meanwhile, the press had become a murder factory: not often a killing machine (though wartime propaganda often amounted to indictment, excitement and incitement); more that the newly established, professional news industry ran on a murderous diet.

‘Get me a murder a day’ was the watchword of popular newspaper editors from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This staple was said to keep the accountants away. Tabloids especially, though they contained a variety of entertaining and informative content, defaulted to the murder story. When facts were sacred, morbid details were the holy of the holy. Even when a reporter’s copy did not begin with someone enjoying the peace of the grave (in news, what happened last comes first), his approach often verged on the murderous. ‘Newsmen’ – in those days it was customary to style themselves as such – were used to looking down on events, and the people in them, from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald overlooking the presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Nothing but wannabe celebs, confessions, sex, drugs, murder and fire on the front-page

If professional news reporting contained more than a whiff of gunsmoke, it was not because objectifying human subjects is always an act of epistemological violence, only matched by the pathological arrogance of abstracting from their personal particulars. These are the complaints levelled against professional journalism by critical theorists and, latterly, self-doubting journalists; but this does to journalism just what journalism stands accused of, namely, character assassination.

Western journalism was professionalised towards the end of the nineteenth century. It had to be. By that time there was so much more to human life that only a trained observer could hope to encompass it, itemise it and formulate news items before something else came along. At an unprecedented rate, human beings were making more things, making more of themselves, and, in the same process, producing new ways of objectifying themselves, including professionally produced, commercially viable journalism.

Insights into the age of stereotyping

Though journalism was trying to capture the liveliness of human beings, character assassination did indeed occur whenever journalists wrote off being human by reducing it to a formula. Thronged with stock figures and predictable personae, many ‘news’ stories amounted to typing, not writing, i.e. stereotyping rather than character development.

However, the hack’s propensity for the hackneyed results not from objectification but from human subjects being alienated from this process. Our alienation from making the world of objects – making the world our object, is how we came to lose a crucial part of human life – a loss of life which has to be acknowledged in contemporary culture. Popular journalism registered this loss by finding itself in the murder story; hence the editor’s craving for murder, and the reporter targeting his subjects as if about to commit one. This suggests that professional journalism’s quest for murder, was as much the sign of its own times as Addison’s earlier search for morality.

In the meantime, the Spectator’s mercantile habits – evaluation, evaluation, evaluation – had been extended from already finished objects on sale in London’s markets, to include the human activity of making new objects for sale. This is a shorthand description of the transition from merchant capital to industrial capitalism, which took place in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of industrial capitalism not only entailed the production of millions more things and millions more people to produce (and consume) them, it also introduced a new level of commonality between all things and all people. From now on, anything anyone did, automatically existed in comparison with everything everyone else had ever done. Each human action occurred twice over: in its particulars, and in relation to human activity in general.

No mere repetition, this was an historic achievement. By virtue of their comparability, human activities were liberated from their local settings in time and space. Unleashed in this way, our productive activity served to mobilise even more activity. In the further development of both personality and commonality, there was more to being human; and a wider spectrum of humanity for reporters to report on. Furthermore, there was greater demand for a multi-faceted continuum – art, politics, media – that could hold it all together.

Yet togetherness was promised rather than fulfilled. The same process which brought people together to make the world, and prompted them to consume journalism’s re-making of the world, also contains that violent moment when productive activity in both its aspects (the general and the particular) is forcibly transferred over to the thing which prompted it – capital, and taken over by the people who own capital – the capitalist class. In this moment, when what we do together is commonly privatised, those who have been active are suddenly alienated from their own actions, estranged from the things they have made but no longer own. As millions of people are separated from the actions they have performed together, so we lose the life we have lived together. Aside from productive activity, there is still another life to be lived, but this is typically biased towards personality rather than commonality. Fully associative life is repeatedly destroyed – so many times over that we hardly recognise its destruction.

What’s really changed in the last thirty years?

This carnage, which is as widespread as capitalist production, was indirectly reflected in journalism’s passion for murder. We were misdirected, however, by the indirect nature of this reflection. Though professional journalism has continually spanned the continuum between personality and commonality, when describing the world exclusively in terms of personal experience, it presents both commonality and its violent destruction as a straightforward function of personality. Such misattribution amounts to another obituary for the independent life of our shared humanity.

In the twentieth century, morbid tendencies within popular journalism were offset by mass participation in democratic politics, with its (limited) tendency to move along the continuum in the other direction, from personality towards commonality. However, after the demise of mass political participation in the 1980s and early 1990s, the path was clear for further separation of the productive life of humanity from the rest of our lives. In this instance, separation has occurred literally – along geographical lines.

After two decades of further estrangement, the Western way of life now largely depends on the actualisation of labour in far-flung places, increasingly in the East. Even if we are not directly involved in financial speculation, the personal existence of ‘Wessies’ is increasingly derivative: we derive our existence from the creation of value elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in their restricted leisure time millions of ‘Essies’ prefer to speculate (non-financially) on the lives of those with more time to cultivate their personality – us ‘Wessies’. We duly oblige, securitising our debt to the East by performing a continuous spectacle, trading representations of ourselves – merchandising the self – on the various media platforms which now comprise ‘contemporary Western culture’.

How too much attention turned to sex-cheating celebs

Pamela Anderson announces she’s going on Big Brother

In these circumstances, do not ask why the bell tolled for Big Brother. The show ended and the house was shut down in 2010 (it’s due to be revived on Channel 5 from August 2011), but, from the p-o-v of the industrialising world, you and I have taken up permanent residence in UK Reality TV. We’re all (minor) celebrities now.

Yet life in the spectacle is an impoverished form of existence. As we are further removed from the commonality occurring in production, we tend to fall back even further on our personal life, which tends to become yet more superficial just as we pack ourselves into it, frantically networking in the forlorn attempt to derive more significance from it. Worse still, we cannot but feel that being so dependent on interpersonal existence amounts to betrayal of that other life which we might have had in common.

The fact is we are cheating on an important part of our humanity – our commonality, the other-half-life which ought to partner our personal existence. It’s been so long, we might not know what it is exactly, but we know we are betraying it; and from where we are, we feel compelled to do so.

Hence the newly compelling attraction of storylines based on intimate, personal betrayal. This type of saga has supplanted the murder story because it represents, indirectly, the most important, recent development in world history – the betrayal brought on by the further separation of personality from commonality. In journalism, this estrangement has been translated and contained within narrowly personal terms, i.e. transposed into suitable terms for a local audience whose centre of gravity has moved along the human continuum towards the strictly personal. Thus for Western news editors, today’s must-have is a personification of intimacy, self-presentation and alienation: enter the celebrity sex-cheat!

Bill Hagerty, editor, BJR, left. Lady Dip Wheeler, far right. Lindsey Hilsum centre.

But we need not be utterly compelled by the dish of the day. That humanity’s two halves have drifted further apart, may mean it’s harder to realise their connection. However, if more journalists can be persuaded to perform like Charles Wheeler, buoyed by a proper account of why they have been asking so much less of themselves recently, that in itself will add to the measure of humanity.

Dr Andrew Calcutt teaches journalism at the University East London. He is editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org; and co-author, with Dr Phil Hammond, of Journalism Studies: a critical introduction (Routledge).

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The White House, of course, does put a positive spin on all negative perceptions. The line is that the president inherited an economic mess that is taking longer than expected to fix; recovery is underway, affirming the president’s policies; the benefits of ObamaCare will soon become evident; Osama bin Laden has been taken out; the Afghanistan “preemptive withdrawal” strategy is working; and Libya is a matter for European and Arab countries and doesn’t require US leadership.

Still, much as we PR folks pride ourselves on our craft, there is a limit to what talking points can achieve. This narrative may satisfy political sympathizers but it is surely not enough to explain Barack Obama’s continuing level of popularity as the United States enters its election campaign season. Almost all of his predecessors had better economic records or could boast some significant progress in foreign policy. The fact is, Obama’s basic record does not compare favorably. So here are some non-spin explanations as to why he is still very much in the game.

First, there is currently no alternative to Barack Obama. Republican hopefuls have only just begun vying to win the opportunity to challenge him. The most likely choice at this point in time appears to be Mitt Romney, hardly a popular politician in his own party given the failing health care entitlement he introduced as governor of Massachusetts. Tougher opponents like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey have said they won’t be competing. Several other candidates could emerge, including Sarah Palin, the bête noire of European intellectuals, but at the moment there is no clear leader rallying the conservative base.

Second, although the economy is doing badly, many voters are willing to give the president a little longer before judging whether his deficit-led/ weak dollar approach has helped or made things worse. The jury is still out on Obama’s economic policies.

Third, Obama is the consummate social justice politician governing in a social entitlement era. Most people in Europe have grown up expecting the state to take care of their old age and ill-health, and to intervene in economic activities for the common good. The United States is perhaps a generation behind this curve but its entitlement programs are in many ways more generous than Europe’s. The wheels of our entitlement culture are beginning to look wobbly, with riots in debt-ridden Greece, resistance to austerity measures in Portugal, and budget travails in California. But the financial limits of big government are still not widely accepted among independents and liberals. The US federal government has been protected from high interest rates by the reserve status of the dollar but with the big three entitlements – social security, Medicare and Medicaid – all heading towards insolvency, judgment day is coming ever closer to Washington. The backlash has begun in the United States with the Tea Party movement but hard political choices can still be deferred for now and Obama has even extended the gravy train with his controversial ObamaCare legislation.

Fourth, the US media is overwhelmingly pro-Democratic, pro-big government and overtly partisan. This means that the president does not have to contend with the same levels of scrutiny and criticism as his predecessor or his political opponents. The new electronic media and Fox News have injected some balance into the equation, but the playing field is still heavily tilted in the president’s favor.

Add to these four facets the personal appeal of the president, a predisposition among Americans to want their presidents to succeed, the absence of personal scandals and the discipline of former officials to keep differences to themselves, and we have the basis for Barack Obama’s current approval levels. In Europe, his unwillingness to flex America’s muscles, particularly in Libya, is also an approach that has been largely embraced.

But two things are sure to change over the next year. First, Barack Obama will have an opponent who will challenge and bring greater attention to his record. Second, voters will be entitled to make a judgment on the president’s economic record. Will they feel better off than four years earlier? Will they believe that the economy is getting better as a result of the president’s policies?

Public relations cannot claim the credit for the president’s approval ratings. Too many other factors are at work. A lot will happen between now and Election Day and, as the campaigning gets underway, the real spin starts now.

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Newspapers are well known for their established biases while human interest magazine-style reports inevitably end up promoting some cause or other. Television and radio broadcasters may delude themselves into believing that they possess a divine gift for objectivity but surely every viewer and listener today can discern editorial slants, while documentaries have evolved from their ostensibly factual beginnings into a one-sided propaganda niche.  Wherever we turn, someone is trying to blind us with their insights and prejudices.  Heck, this column is doing exactly the same!

Gavin Carter

A fair-minded person might assume that an “information eco-system” characterized by so much diversity must produce a broad range of evenly or randomly distributed viewpoints.  But this simply isn’t the case.  As with natural eco-systems, there are winners and losers.

The fact that many countries, like the United Kingdom for example, maintain politically mandated requirements for broadcasting to be politically balanced demonstrates a widespread belief that objectivity from TV and radio organizations is unnatural and has to be imposed.  At the same time, it also indicates a belief that objective news dissemination on TV and radio (but not newspapers) is both socially desirable and somehow quantifiable.

In the United States, Ronald Reagan peeled away the pretense of government-controlled balance on the airwaves and the result is unabashed commentary across the political spectrum. Amidst this complex global web of modern news dissemination lies the common thread of hostility to those entities with interests in mineral extraction, energy and food production.  These poor souls are pilloried for supposedly causing environmental devastation, destroying communities and seizing resources and are characterized as deceitful, reckless and manipulative.  According to this narrative, the common man is helpless to resist such omnipotent forces for harm.

Thankfully, the media is here to level the playing field by exposing their malfeasance! What is striking about this situation is the pliant and timid response from the industries themselves.  And this has consequences for public relations counselors who are busy positioning organizations that are constantly under attack.  By and large the companies involved – such as electrical utilities or oil giants – treat opposition to their activities as if it was exclusively focused on them.  Everything is relative so outreach responses are designed to make them alone look good – or better than their competitors – be it through a campaign like BP’s Beyond Petroleum or through the modern practice of publishing corporate responsibility reports.

But can this blinkered outlook be sustained when reality is so different? What are the business consequences for other oil companies, mining interests and fishermen in our core resource gathering industries when a company like BP hands $20 billion to the United States Treasury in a shakedown, or British utilities succumb to a so-called windfall profits tax? In the United States, polling has consistently shown that around 80 per cent of information disseminators – er, journalists – identify themselves as politically left of center.  Perhaps this is not surprising given that a similar proportion of university and college professors and lecturers in the arts identify themselves in the same way.

PRs are always trying to put things into their proper context, so here is the key: The political left is philosophically opposed to economic development.  This is not to say that everyone on the left advocates ending all economic development now (although some do).  What we hear from the soft left are calls for greater government regulation, restrictions on what resources can be used, designations on areas from where they can be extracted, limits on quantities that may be taken, requirements on how they can be removed, imposition of taxes on their exploitation, etc.

In other words, while there may be some elements of acceptance on the left that economic development is a good thing, it is qualified by a series of conditions that they intellectualize as being socially desirable.  Escaping from political niceties, this is fundamentally anti-development.

Gavin Carter in the media throng

The bottom line is that economic resources that spur development – cheap and available gasoline/petrol, electricity and food – are anathema to the left.  They feed growing populations, transportation systems and consumption that are viewed as unsustainable and unnecessary. We are told that we don’t really “need” big power plants, chemical factories, oil tankers, tuna or modified crops.  Instead we have a duty to minimize our environmental footprint, carbon or otherwise, under the benevolent guidance of the political left. It is opposition to economic development  – not the more commonly protested safety or environmental issues – that drives criticism of the companies that public relations professionals are defending.  We need to wise up and recognize it for what it is.  Politics is the key. Gavin Carter is President of Gavin Carter and Associates in Alexandria, Virginia and purveyor of AskGavino.com

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Apropos Paul Seaman’s excellent coverage of the trouble at HP, a big FT analysis piece (“Moral Hazards”, 14/15 August 2010) suggests that there’s a new and very strict “moral” climate about. In particular, the modern CEO has to be virtue personified. The FT notes that CEOs aren’t often castigated for sexual failings, per se. However, if affairs are linked to employees (see the recent case of Mr Hurd, the CEO of HP), then it becomes a matter of abuse of power. If they are linked to competitors, then conflicts of interest are cited. Being casual or naughty about expenses is bad in a more obvious way: because no-one else is allowed lax accounting. (Again, see the Hurd case.)

It’s hard to argue against these versions of the new strictness. Leaders should show a good example, and so on.

I am less thrilled by the way any kind of lying is now bad news, even if it’s small stuff done to cover up embarrassment rather than bad behaviour (see the case of Mr Browne, of BP). In the good old days, white lies were regarded as inevitable and invaluable and there’s merit in that old hypocrisy.

Still, if we insist on banging on about openness, and perhaps we should, then I see that it becomes harder to keep little convenient zones of condoned mendacity.

But I am uneasy about this new Puritanism and I doubt that it will be kept in proper check.

I meet a very wide range of leaders of every kind and always in conditions of strictest privacy. I think I can say that it has taught me that “there’s none so odd as folk”. I mean that it is almost impossible to predict who will have dark secrets, terrible doubts, awesome strength in a crisis, great honour, sudden feebleness. Some people show all of these in a fortnight.

Of all the fallibilities people show I’d say sexual weaknesses (or secrets) outmatch greed, cruelty, fear and a whole bunch of others put together for frequency and career-crashing potential.

So I repeat the earlier caveat: sexual shenanigans (or secrets) should only matter insofar as they are a corporate problem, which ought to be not often. But in the real world, sex still has enormous power to drag reputations under.

This is part of a wider problem.

We see already in politics that there’s a demand for a new institutional and personal purity. The same taste seems to be spreading to firms. The worrying thing of course is to wonder whether we want colourless parliaments peopled by colourless politicians, or colourless firms led by colourless managers.

It seems obvious that politicians can’t be any good and be quite normal. They have to be risk-takers of a high order, and the more so if they are operating in a lively democracy which tips people out of power pretty swiftly and even chaotically. Many good politicians are chancers, and sometimes on a large scale. I should say that scandal is inevitable.

Firms are a bit different, because they are so diverse. A one-man band, or a family firm, or a partnership can be as odd as its customers like. A public firm, especially a large one, is much more likely to be dull, and perhaps needs to be. But should we want its bosses to be very dull?

As a rough guide, the more entrepreneurial an outfit, the more its bosses will be a little naughty. It follows that only if you want an accountants’ paradise can you ordain a firm run by the well-behaved. (And it isn’t guaranteed that accountants will be either dull or decent, of course.)

Here is a way out. We can require the bosses of firms only to be as honest and as well-behaved as they promise to be. I know: you’d still not know whether you’d trusted a liar. But you take my point. We can be very strict about the stated rules, but beyond that, a person’s private life should indeed be private. I think that is Max Moseley’s excellent point as he insists that the media should not have been allowed to pry into his sex-games. But we see the difficulty.

Max is saying he has a right to his privacy. It doesn’t follow, but I think it is implied, that there are lots of things which might damage a person’s reputation or standing which he or she has a right to keep secret. I agree. I don’t think it’s fair that a leader should be required to satisfy the public that they wouldn’t be shocked by his or her private behaviour. So the public should be shielded from it.

That’s the deal. CEOs (like teachers, footballers and all the so-called role-models) must be squeaky clean in a quite new way, and be shielded from prurience in a quite new way. Only if we have the sense not to pry can we be guaranteed to see good behaviour wherever we look.

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