City: Blameless?

The buck does not stop at the board of British Airways because, it seems, it never gets there in the first place. Astonishingly, not a single employee or director is losing his job over the dirty tricks scandal. BA believes the public and shareholders should be reassured by its own inimitable brand of internal inquiry. To determine whether anyone on the board was guilty, the directors asked each other whether they were involved. To no one's surprise, they all said no. Few people believe them, of course. Few except Lord King. The chairman blandly tells us the board is responsible but no one is to blame. That is a difficult concept for most folk outside BA to get their heads round. Even if the senior executives were exonerated by a hundred inquiries, the fact remains that something is badly wrong with the company if they did not know about the dirty tricks, and equally badly wrong if they did.