Barclays Bob tried to smarm them, tried to tell them he was ‘shocked’. He even pulled the I-knew-nothing gambit. The Commons Treasury committee did not believe him. To put it in language this Yankie banker might understand, MPs did not ‘buy’ him.
They gave him a rumbling pummelling. Parliament exists to voice public opinion. Mr Diamond was confronted by a contained fury. Here was Parliament as the public square, giving vent to society’s dignified disgust.
Andrea Leadsom’s bosom heaved, her lips a bee-sting of indignation.
Some City boys pay good money to be mistreated by middle-aged blonde women. Mr Diamond got it free.
Bank Barclays
Mrs Leadsom (Con, S Northants), who used to work in finance, stared at the former Barclays chief executive with her eyes ablaze, her countenance beaky. He tried to meander. She kept slapping him – verbally – and wrenching him back to the topic. ‘Fraud and corruption were going on under your noses,’ she cried.
He tried to coat her with treacle, calling her ‘Andrea’. She called him ‘Mr Diamond’ right back, in snortingly English fashion, and said that at Barclays it had been a case of rich bankers ‘looking after number one’.
They had swapped favours for bottles of Bollinger.
Into Mr Diamond’s being bored those Leadsom headlights. I was sitting not far behind him and, catching some of her glare, felt my giblets shrivel.
Yikes! Mr Diamond pulled out a packet of Kleenex and blew his nose.
Security beforehand was tight. A sniffer dog checked the corridor, pausing when a colleague unwrapped a sandwich. Oooh, Scooby snack. Commons security bods were feverish. The coppers crunched their knuckles.
Mr Diamond arrived with a big-shouldered bloke about 6ft 5in high. A bodyguard? With Mrs Leadsom around, not a bad idea.
Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie (Con, Chichester) got things off to a donnish, disapproving start. He was unimpressed when Mr Diamond failed to follow him with sufficient attention. Mr Diamond kept whispering about how much he ‘loved’ Barclays.
Mr Tyrie, crisply: ‘Can we get to the point?’ Later: ‘I think we already knew that.’ When Mr Diamond came out for the umpteenth time with ‘I love Barclays’, Mr Tyrie choked: ‘We get that! We really do!’ By now the room was laughing at the £20milion (a year) man.
Quizzed by Jesse Norman (Con, Hereford), Mr Diamond came over all familiar, using his Christian name. It was the same with every following MP:
‘Michael,’ ‘David’, ‘Andy’, ‘Ja-hn’, ‘George’, etc. Each time, more people in the room shuddered. The matey American approach was horribly ill-advised. It made the MPs feel used. It made Mr Diamond sound fake.
Would he have tried such informality on Capitol Hill? No. Well, he won’t try it here again, I suspect.
David Ruffley (Con, Bury St Edmunds) scythed through the Diamond filibusters. Mr Ruffley had to shout and pull on his trouser waistband and suck in extra supplies of air to do so.
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As much as I want to see the worm squirm, I found myself squirming at the style of writing. Read like a badly written jingoistic thriller.
Frankly I don’t give a monkey’s if our right and proper ways are smugly superior to those “Yankees” I just want to see some justice for once where these greedy self indulgent corporates are concerned.
… Pull a few Tory Donors in, too! Right & proper ways indeed — Independent inquiry please you Conservatives (at least that’s what I email’d my MP to the affect of: she’s one of em).
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of reasons will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”
Anon.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men,
they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorises it, and a moral code that glorifies it.”
.
Frederic Bastiat, The Law 1850
Yeah, and now it’s got past Blair’s lite, late-capitalisms of uniform mediocrity (toni hovers above), and it’s coming undone by the hidden virtues of current technologies — They blame Us!
a right royal slap on the wrist, sacked from his 150 million a year job with full pension and left to fend for himself… that poor man must be totally heartbroken!!!!