Corrupt Banker Paul Flowers gets Easy Ride by Newsnight

[Teddy Bear]

Question: When is a banker not an evil malevolent figure for the BBC?
Answer: When he truly is an evil malevolent human being, but he was put in that position by the Labour party.

When I read the article today about him in the Mail, and saw the kind of ride he was given on Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman, it was clear that there must be a good reason for the BBC not to have laid into him. Sure enough it was clear when I saw it was the Labour party that put this miscreant into that position. I then found another article in the Spectator highlighting this already last November, as well as show just how little effort the BBC hypocritically put into doing any journalism on the subject.

Here first is the article in the Mail to see just what this individual got up to.

I have sinned: In self-serving TV confession, Co-op boss in sex and drug shame says he's having therapy for human frailties

• Former chairman reveals he checked in to 'traumatic' addiction treatment
• He still attends weekly to tackle 'deep-seated' reasons for his drug abuse
• 'You certainly find out who your friends are,' he told BBC's Jeremy Paxman
• He also said government pressured him to take over 600 Lloyds branches
• Orders came right from the top, he said - even though bank was in trouble
• Mr Flowers' drug use was exposed last November by The Mail on Sunday

By James Salmon

Disgraced former Co-op Bank boss Paul Flowers has spoken for the first time of his involvement in a drugs and sex scandal, admitting: ‘I have sinned’.

The methodist minister said he had ‘frailties’ like ‘every human being’.

He now goes to weekly therapy sessions after the ‘hellish’ period in November when footage of the openly gay banker allegedly buying hard drugs became public.

It came after the 63-year-old quit his £132,000-a-year job as chairman of the troubled bank in June last year shortly after a £1.5billion black hole emerged in its finances.

In an extraordinary interview aired on BBC Newsnight last night, he said ‘things got pretty hairy’ at the end of last year.

‘I am in company with every other human being for having my frailties and some of my fragility exposed,’ he added.

‘Most people get through life without having that being made public but of course I have sinned, if you want to put it in that old fashioned way.’

He added: ‘I think I’m much more secure in my own skin, much more self-aware than I was before. You certainly find out who your friends are even if some in the bank and in politics and the church have been noticeable by their absence.’

The scandal erupted as the Co-op Bank battled for survival after years of mis-management under Flowers and other senior bosses.

A rescue package was agreed in December that involved the self-proclaimed ‘ethical’ group ceding control to institutional investors, including US hedge funds.

But last night Flowers heaped blame on the Government – singling out the Chancellor – for exerting ‘considerable pressure’ to push through the Co-op’s doomed bid to buy 631 branches from Lloyds.

The bank was forced to pull out of the deal in April last year because of its parlous finances.

Flowers said ‘there was pressure certainly from [former Treasury minister] Mark Hoban, but I believe and know that that originated much higher up with the Chancellor himself.’

He said he had received calls ‘two or three times a week’ from Mr Hoban to check how the deal was going. However, his comments contradict those made at the Treasury Select Committee on November 6, shortly before the drugs scandal came to light.

Asked if the discussions over the deal amounted to political pressure, he said: ‘No, I do not believe they did’. Last night the Treasury rejected Flowers’ claims and said the deal was a ‘purely commercial matter for Lloyds Bank and the Co-op Bank’.

The police investigation involves allegations that Flowers used his Co-op and Bradford Council email accounts to organise drug-fuelled orgies with rent boys after a series of embarrassing messages and texts were published.

In one message, he allegedly boasted to a drugs dealer of having two bottles of the date rape drug GHB.

He is also alleged to have used crystal meth, crack cocaine and the horse tranquilliser ketamine – or brought them along to orgies.

The behaviour appears to have continued after the scandal broke, with Flowers saying in a text in November: ‘Off f****** trollies on coke and ketamine which I was given by this cute dealer in Manchester!! It is the best I have ever had.’

Flowers has previously claimed his behaviour was influenced by the death of his mother Muriel in 2012.

But it is not the first time he has been caught ‘sinning’. It emerged that the real reason he resigned from Bradford Council in 2011 was because ‘inappropriate but not illegal’ pornography was found on his laptop. He was also once convicted for gross indecency in a public toilet in 1981.

A separate Treasury-led investigation is also investigating how Flowers was appointed to run a bank, despite only working as a bank clerk for several years after leaving university. He told the committee the Co-op’s balance sheets had £3billion of assets, when it was actually £47billion.

The scandal has also been acutely embarrassing for Labour, which has close ties with the mutual. As part of a major overhaul, the Co-op is now considering plans to scrap its £1million annual donation to the party.

The mutual is set to announce next month it made a record loss of more than £2billion last year, driven by bank losses of between £1.2billion and £1.3billion.

It is now the subject of no less than seven investigations, including the police probe into Flowers, who is on bail.

A Treasury spokesman said last night: ‘Since the full extent of the situation at Co-op Bank became clear the Chancellor has ordered an independent investigation into the events at the Co-op Bank and the circumstances surrounding them.’

Here's Charles Moore from the Spectator about it.

The Paul Flowers scandal exposes the rotten heart of the Labour movement
Charles Moore

There has naturally been plenty of unfavorable comment on how the Revd Paul Flowers, the ‘crystal Methodist’, was allowed by the Financial Services Authority to become chairman of the Co-op Bank. But the story does not reflect very well on the media either. If you look at Robert Peston’s BBC blog on the subject, for instance, there is a lot of ‘I am told’ and ‘according to the Manchester Evening News’.

Is there no one in the BBC’s enormous staff who could have done a bit of work years ago on the Revd Mr Flowers? Isn’t it even more extraordinary that the media did not pick up Mr Flowers’s ignorant testimony earlier this month to the Treasury Select Committee until it was drawn to their attention on Sunday after he was exposed by the Mail on Sunday for buying illegal drugs? It seems truer than ever that the only way to ensure no one notices you is to say something publicly within the Palace of Westminster.


Like Falkirk and Grangemouth (see last week’s Notes), this is a story about the inner working of the Labour movement. It is grimy in its details. It may even require leaving London and going somewhere in the north to discover the facts. I suppose that is too much to ask. But if it had been a story about Tory corruption of a bank, I feel Mr Peston and co would have been in more of a hurry to find out about it.

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Steven Glover at the Mail gives his views about the Paxman Newsnight 'interview' with Flowers. More like 'Don't say it with Flowers'.

Rent boys, the Crystal Methodist and twisted values at the BBC

By Stephen Glover

Although I have castigated the BBC over the years, I have seldom been as appalled by its strange values and lack of robust journalistic standards as I was on Tuesday evening.

For several hours, viewers had been informed that BBC2's Newsnight was going to carry an 'exclusive' interview with the former chairman of the Co-op Bank, the Reverend Paul Flowers.

Readers may recall that last November the Mail on Sunday discovered that Mr Flowers had bought and taken illegal drugs, including crystal meth, crack cocaine and ketamine. Apparently incontrovertible evidence of his use of rent boys was also produced.

None of this was mentioned on various BBC news bulletins. Instead, we were told that Mr Flowers had 'revealed' that, while he was chairman, the Government — including the Chancellor, George Osborne — had put pressure on the Co-op Bank before it aborted plans to buy 600 Lloyds Bank branches.

It was this botched deal that exposed the Co-op's grave financial problems. The Labour-supporting Mr Flowers was trying to shift some of the blame to the Tory-led Government. And the BBC took his self-serving allegations on trust.

Whatever pressure the Government may have applied, it was the Co-op's decision as to whether or not to go ahead with the acquisition. Equally, the bank's disastrous financial record was entirely its — and Mr Flowers's — responsibility.
Secret 'drug deal' that brought down former bank chief Flowers

This lopsided and weirdly indulgent attitude towards Mr Flowers coloured the entire interview on Newsnight, which was conducted by Jeremy Paxman — traditionally an admirably tough interrogator. On this occasion he was about as forensic as a puppy.

He smiled fondly at the former Co-op Bank chairman and Methodist minister or looked concerned. He and Mr Flowers shared jokes about Lucifer and the religious poet Dante. Questions were patted over the net as though they were a couple of old clubmen reviewing the distant past.

Preposterous

Did Mr Paxman pull his punches because he was worried about the mental well-being of the former banker? (Mr Flowers admitted he had attended a 28-day addictions treatment programme that was 'cathartic and traumatic'.) Had some prior agreement been made not to ask difficult questions? Or had Paxo been instructed by his bosses to go easy?

The reputedly fearsome inquisitor barely mentioned drugs or rent boys. When he did pluck up the courage to ask Mr Flowers whether he had taken drugs while chairman, he was swatted aside with the excuse that, as the police were looking at the matter, he'd rather not comment.

But Mr Flowers was allowed to insinuate that the Mail on Sunday's allegations were at least partly false without being invited to specify which of them he was referring to. When he preposterously suggested that the paper had 'pseudo-fascist, far-Right tendencies [that] make Vladimir Putin look like a bleeding heart liberal', Paxo did not demur.

Nor did he think it was worth mentioning allegations that Mr Flowers was investigated for fiddling his expenses when chairman of a drugs charity some years ago, or remind him that in 2011 he had been required to stand down as a Labour councillor in Bradford after gay porn was discovered on his laptop.

He didn't inquire about the soft loans and donations made to the Labour Party by the Co-op Bank when Mr Flowers was chairman, including a £50,000 gift to the office of Ed Balls, who, with Ed Miliband, invited him to a shindig at No 10 in February 2010.

Perhaps most bizarrely of all, he scarcely examined Mr Flowers over his disastrous chairmanship, for which he was paid £125,000 a year. Paxo should have mentioned that only last week the former Labour City minister Lord Myners criticised the Co-op Bank for its 'dysfunctionality' and undemocratic nature.

He did remember that last year Mr Flowers told a Commons committee that the bank's assets were £3 billion when they were, in fact, £47 billion, but expressed no astonishment when the former chairman partly blamed his amazing error on the aggression of MPs.

It was like watching a once magnificent heavyweight boxing champion shuffling around the ring, either unwilling or unable to land a single punch. If Mr Flowers had been a Tory-supporting, fat-cat City banker, Mr Paxman would surely have torn him apart — and rightly so.

Needless to say, though the former banker admitted he had 'sinned', he was reluctant to admit much fault, insisted that he had been appointed after 'a very rigorous process of selection' and constantly cast around for excuses for his failures.

I realise that Newsnight averages only about 500,000 viewers a show, but it remains the BBC's foremost current affairs programme. Mr Flowers is guilty of moral lapses inexcusable in a layman, let alone a clergyman, and he has presided over a bank which may very possibly be going to the wall.

If there is any man alive who deserves to be hauled over the coals, it's the Reverend Paul Flowers. Some exclusive! But I suspect he consented to being interviewed by Newsnight only because he knew he would be treated with kid gloves.

Is it possible Paxo's brain has somehow been infiltrated by Ian Katz, the former deputy editor of The Guardian, who was appointed editor of Newsnight last July, where he joined an old colleague from the paper, political editor Allegra Stratton?

Bias

Mr Katz recently strengthened the Left-of-Centre line-up on the programme by appointing Duncan Weldon, a former Labour adviser and senior economist at the Trade Union Congress, who has very little journalistic experience. But he is a good Leftie!

The same Mr Katz gleefully tweeted Mr Flowers's outrageous remarks about the Mail on Sunday when the show had ended. Is this how a grown-up editor should behave? Is it serious journalism? No, and no.

Newsnight has nearly always had a Left-wing bias, but Mr Katz appears to be in the process of shamelessly consolidating it. The appointment of Mr Weldon (another apparent Leftie, Chris Cook, has also recently jumped aboard as policy editor) amounts to another rude gesture towards those who don't share his prejudices.

But then the BBC increasingly seems to occupy a world of its own. A few months before Mr Katz was slotted into place, its director-general, Tony Hall, appointed James Purnell, a former Blairite Cabinet minister, as 'director of strategy and digital'. On Monday, Mr Purnell opined that the licence fee works 'pretty well'. That's all right then.

Arrogance

Meanwhile, it emerges that Lord Hall is refusing to appear before a committee of MPs to discuss the BBC's coverage of EU affairs, claiming that this would undermine 'editorial independence'. What arrogance! What bunkum!

Of course, the BBC has many fine journalists. Paxo should be one of them. Another may be Laura Kuenssberg — one promising recent recruit to Newsnight — who not long ago brilliantly eviscerated Harriet Harman over her links to the Paedophile Information Exchange during the Seventies.

But the interview of Paul Flowers constituted an abdication of proper journalism. That, and the way the BBC promoted it throughout its news programmes as a hugely important exclusive — whereas, in fact, it was intended as a piece of anti-Tory propaganda — betray some pretty twisted journalistic values. The truth is that the BBC would not have exposed his deviant behaviour and colossal mistakes — as newspaper journalism has done — in a thousand years.

[Teddy Bear]

Reflections by the Mail on the clear insidious BBC behaviour over this clearly insidious individual.

MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: A biased BBC isn't worth its licence fee

By Mail On Sunday Comment

The Rev Paul Flowers has been exposed as a buffoon, who had no idea of the size of the bank of which he was Chairman.

He has also been shown by hard evidence to be a grotesque hypocrite, with a personal life quite out of keeping with his position in the Methodist Church.

Those who trusted him have acted accordingly. The Methodist Church has suspended him indefinitely. The Co-operative Bank forced him to resign. Even the Labour Party, no stranger to internal irregularities, has suspended him.

The Mail on Sunday, acting quite properly in the tradition of robust journalism, played a major part in his downfall by exposing his drug abuse. Mr Flowers might well feel aggrieved at that. Even saints (which he is not) dislike being shown up in public.

But why did the supposedly impartial BBC feel it was its job to sympathise with Mr Flowers, and to give him a platform for an orgy of public self-pity, combined with crude, baseless abuse of this newspaper?

The BBC’s bias is most clearly shown by its frequent failures to pursue and interrogate those with whom it secretly sympathises. Yet it will turn like a tiger on those of whom it secretly disapproves.

Who can forget Jeremy Paxman’s relentless interrogation of former Tory Home Secretary Michael Howard, in which he asked the same question 12 times?

But in his encounter with Mr Flowers, Mr Paxman was transformed from tiger into purring pussycat.

His questions were gentle lobs. He failed to rebuke Mr Flowers for blatantly flattering him with allusions to his supposed ferocity.

Mr Paxman even laughed sycophantically at an unfunny remark about scripture, as if the two men were Oxbridge dons maundering over the port.

He did not press Mr Flowers on his not-very-Christian unwillingness to offer a proper apology for his actions or show any convincing remorse.

He failed to challenge Mr Flowers’s refusal (on spurious legal grounds) to discuss his alleged drug abuse, or his claim that he cannot afford to sue The Mail on Sunday, in this era of no-win, no-fee lawyers.

The real reason for his silence is that this newspaper’s stories are true.

We cannot know the reason for this toothless, flaccid performance by the famed Grand Inquisitor of the BBC.

But there is a clue in the way in which Mr Flowers was wholly unchallenged when he used the interview to attack The Mail on Sunday as ‘pseudo-fascist’, the sort of baseless, politically illiterate abuse that might be shouted at a student demonstration, rather than spoken by a man of the cloth.

How ironic that last week’s Mail on Sunday revealed Mr Paxman’s Newsnight colleague Duncan Weldon tried to minimise his own past as a supporter of the BNP.

The BBC simply does not deserve the great privilege of the licence fee if it cannot try harder than this to be fair

[Teddy Bear]

When a former editor of Radio4 enters the fray and also criticises Newsnight for their atrocious coverage of Flowers, you know it's serious.
Notice just how caring Paxman becomes when he wants to be, and just who he grants it to.

The first clue that Flowers had eschttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592516/Flowers-brazen-TV-lies-simpering-Paxman-shameful-new-low-impartial-BBC-Furious-backlash-BBC-let-Left-wing-Methodist-ran-Labour-supporting-bank-lie-soft-interview.htmlped unscathed emerged on Radio 4’s PM programme. In a spectacular example of cross promotion of its wares that infuriates the BBC’s commercial competitors, PM’s Eddie Mair interviewed his colleague about Newsnight’s story. Paxman said Flowers came across as a potentially likeable man who had experienced terrible pressure.

How this cuddly interview with a pompous fraud shows a BBC that's not worth saving, by ex-Radio 4 editor

By Professor Tim Luckhurst , ex-editor of the Today programme

The BBC faces a grave and unprecedented crisis. Shamed by failures such as the Jimmy Savile scandal and outrageous payments to departing executives, the Corporation now confronts an existential threat: decriminalisation of non-payment of its licence fee.

MPs recently voted to permit this reform, which the BBC believes would cut its income by £200 million per year.

Meanwhile, the crucial challenge of charter renewal must be completed by 2016 – against a backdrop of revolutionary technological change and economic uncertainty.

Respected lifelong supporters such as Roger Mosey, former editorial director and the mastermind behind coverage of the 2012 Olympics, are beginning to argue for real change in the BBC’s size and structure. This is the context in which Jeremy Paxman sat down last week to interview Paul Flowers, disgraced former Chairman of the Co-operative Bank, for Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship television current affairs show.

For Paxman, feared and admired by Britain’s political elite as the BBC’s most formidable on-screen interrogator, this should have been a task to relish. Flowers, better known as the Crystal Methodist, was leader of a major British bank that was very nearly bankrupted under his chairmanship. He had given no broadcast interviews since his disgrace. Paxman had a glorious and unique opportunity to ask hard and important questions.

Why did Flowers accept a job for which he was luminously unqualified? Was his judgment clouded by his addictions? How did he hide his use of hard drugs and rent boys from other members of the Co-op board? Did he remain in post when he knew he could not manage the complex challenges facing his bank because he needed his generous salary to maintain his double-life?

The evidence to inform such a grilling was available. It was published last year in this newspaper in a detailed exclusive that went on to dominate the BBC’s news. Jeremy Paxman must have had access to it; Britain’s national newspapers are delivered to the Newsnight offices every day.

But Paxman did not grill Flowers. He did not even toast him lightly. This giant among broadcasters, who has reduced junior politicians to tears and whose intellectual acuity can intimidate Cabinet Ministers, played the softest of soft cops.

His first question: ‘What’s this last year been like?’ set the tone, and it rarely got any harsher. Flowers got away with claiming that he was not responsible for his own grotesque incompetence because he hadn’t appointed himself to the Co-op board, ‘others did that’.

Paxman did not bother to explore whether he should have declined the job. He did nothing to prevent Paul Flowers portraying himself as an innocent exposed to pressures he could not be expected to handle. Everything was somebody else’s fault. This Methodist minister who utterly betrayed his vows became simply unfortunate.

And then it became truly offensive. The sex- and drug-addicted Flowers, this pompous fraud who told the Treasury Select Committee that his bank’s balance-sheet assets were £3 billion when they were, in fact, £47 billion, attacked this newspaper for daring to expose him.

Britain’s most successful Sunday newspaper is, he says, a ‘pseudo- fascist’ title with ‘far-right tendencies that make Vladimir Putin look like a bleeding heart liberal’. This was vile and atrocious nonsense, but Paxman did not challenge it.

We have seen him sneer contemptuously at interviewees who try to escape blame by shooting the messenger. With the Crystal Methodist he simply let it pass.

This was a recorded interview, so the BBC knew what it had long before it appeared on Newsnight. Sadly, nobody paused to think that it might not be any good.

The first clue that Flowers had escaped unscathed emerged on Radio 4’s PM programme. In a spectacular example of cross promotion of its wares that infuriates the BBC’s commercial competitors, PM’s Eddie Mair interviewed his colleague about Newsnight’s story. Paxman said Flowers came across as a potentially likeable man who had experienced terrible pressure.

According to Newsnight’s legendary anchorman, the important part of the interview was Flowers’s assertion that the Chancellor of the Exchequer put pressure on the Co-op to buy branches from Lloyds.

Flowers is a former Labour councillor. He backed a £50,000 donation to Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls’s office. Ed Miliband appointed him to the Labour Party’s advisory board on finance. His allegations were patently partisan and self-serving. Paxman should have recognised instantly that his interviewee was not a reliable source of political wisdom.

What went wrong? Was Newsnight so keen to secure an interview with Flowers that it promised him an easy ride? That is denied emphatically, but part of the answer certainly lies in big changes taking place at the programme under the leadership of a new editor. Ian Katz, who was until recently deputy editor of The Guardian newspaper, has been given a free hand to shake things up and attract new viewers. Newsnight’s loss in January of long-serving presenter Gavin Esler, in my opinion a better and more insightful journalist than Paxman, has clearly weakened the show.

The recruitment from ITV of the brilliant Laura Kuenssberg on a salary of £200,000 has provoked jealousy. Some insiders say Paxman himself is revealing signs of insecurity. That beard was bad; a gentle approach to important interviews would be intolerable. And Katz has made blatant errors, such as calling Shadow Minister Rachel Reeves ‘boring’ on Twitter. I’m all for change, and Ian Katz has the talent to make it happen, but he must maintain editorial standards.

Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Paul Flowers was more than a wasted opportunity to expose details of a shocking scandal. It betrayed values viewers are entitled to expect and insulted an ally the BBC needs. Great popular newspapers reserve the right to criticise the BBC and hold it to account. That is their duty. But, when the Corporation is in real danger, the British press rallies to its cause.

Newspapers may demand a better BBC, but they know the Corporation is a crucial partner. Since the BBC fought for its independence from government during the General Strike of 1926, newspapers have been Auntie’s critical friends. The BBC needs them to remain friendly now, not least because old arguments about the licence fee’s unique capacity to serve our democracy are wearing thin.

Just 24 hours after Newsnight’s abject handling of Paul Flowers, an ambitious commercial broadcaster, LBC Radio, hosted a debate between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage that aired crucial issues concerning Britain’s future. The result: Wednesday evening’s BBC news was dominated by a broadcast coup in which it had played no part.

In August 2011 Sky News beat the BBC to dominate television coverage of the liberation of Tripoli. New technologies mean such things will happen more often. The BBC’s defence must include a relentless focus on quality.

The media world it once dominated is changing radically and the BBC must fight harder than ever to retain its place at the heart of British life. Winning will require the highest standards of professional excellence. They cannot be achieved through experiments that allow a rottweiler of Paxman’s calibre to mutate into a cuddly, emollient eccentric.

If Newsnight’s interview with Paul Flowers was an example of a new style of BBC journalism then it should be abandoned immediately. A BBC that encouraged such abdication of editorial rigour would not be worth saving.