This afternoon’s rather lengthy Treasury Select Committee hearing with Bob Diamond suggests that Ed Miliband might be on to something with his calls for a judge-led inquiry. We were two hours into the session when John Thurso remarked:
‘If you were an English cricketer, I suspect your name would be Geoffrey Boycott… You’ve been occupying the crease for two-and-a-half hours and I’m not sure we’re a great deal further forward.’
If Boycott were watching, he’d remark that his mother could have batted away the majority of the questions thrown to Diamond with a stick of rhubarb. This committee meeting provided the former Barclays chief executive with a pretty flat pitch.
We learned that the Whitehall figures that Paul Tucker had told him were concerned about the bank’s Libor rate were ‘government officials’. Later Diamond said they were ministers. He said:
‘I think what’s interesting is my reaction to that note was appreciation in Paul Tucker doing his job. What he was trying to tell me is that there were ministers in Whitehall who were hearing that Barclays was always high. My reaction was ‘Paul, you have to get to Whitehall. You have to know that they know we are funding fine.”
So were they ministers or officials? The committee never got to the bottom of that. But Diamond did say he didn’t believe ministers were actually asking for Libor to be cut. Tucker has requested that he appear before the committee ‘as soon as possible’ to discuss the call. So it will be Tucker’s version against Diamond’s, unless he plans to produce his own recording in the next few days.
The committee trundled on, with Bob managing to cheese off its members by insisting on referring to them by their first names throughout. He was also very, very keen to impress upon everyone listening just how much he loved Barclays. John Mann was unimpressed with this all-consuming love, though. In some of the best questioning of the hearing, he told Diamond that he would tattoo the values of the Quakers who set up Barclays on Diamond’s knuckles. He also accused Diamond of being incompetent:
‘I’m asking you, what are you going to to do to put the record straight for your personal behaviour. Because you personally are responsible. Either by being complicit, or by being incompetent.’
Mann also got to the nub of how the public feels about Diamond’s bonus:
‘I’ll offer you a little love… what happens to the shares does nothing for the taxpayer… your bonus each year is equivalent to the amount of money that our largest homelessness charity Shelter has to survive on.‘
But Diamond managed to bat that away too. At some points he seemed to be enjoying himself rather: the ‘little love joke’ from Mann was in response to a wisecrack from a grinning Diamond to one MP who had managed to praise his prowess at BarCap. At other times he seemed relaxed, laboriously cleaning his glasses with his tie. Perhaps the hearing would have made a little more progress had Geoffrey Boycott been on the committee and asking the questions.
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