I was awfully rude to the Financial Conduct Authority today. (Stop cheering banker boy at the back, it was terrible behaviour).
The FCA put out a statement of high interest to me at 10am. Our deadline is 11am.
To interpret it, I needed to speak to Jonathan Davidson, the FCA executive quoted in the release.
He’s not available, say the FCA. We need to check his diary. He might have time three weeks on Wednesday.
If you don’t put him on the phone right now, I say, I’m going to do a column taking the piss out of your ridiculous statement and the inherently ridiculous idea behind it.
Davidson phones me five minutes later. We have a cordial, very lively chat about the FCA’s interesting ideas on reforming City culture.
Then everything changes, and I don’t, indeed can’t, write about the issue.
From the outside, it must be very difficult to understand how things can go from vital to irrelevant in such a short space of time.
In normal organisations, things are planned over weeks and months. In newspapers, they get planned, binned, revived and chucked away again in the space of ten minutes.
If we are rude to you, sometimes that is why.
