"The Thick of It" ends .. with food for thought

In the world of risk management, reputation risk seems to be a growth area.   The notion needs to be treated with caution: the first objective in avoiding damage to reputation has to be to manage other risks adequately and try not to get into hot water in the first place.  

We need to be particularly careful in the public sector not to let the management of reputation risk take over. 

The plot of the final series of ‘The Thick of It’, which ended last night, revolved around the case of the unseen Mr Tickell,  a health worker with a history of mental illness who becomes  a media cause celebre when he appears to be bullied out of his hospital-owned tied accommodation.

The spin doctors get hold of Tickell’s medical records and release them to the press to discredit him as a nutter.  In the real world, you would hope that the Government would identify from Tickell’s medical history that he was a vulnerable person who needed to be treated with particular care and sensitivity.  In the story they do the opposite, leading to Tickell’s suicide and career-limiting consequences for officials and politicians alike.  (Did I mention this is a comedy – and a hilarious one?)

The story is about what happens when the management of reputation risk takes over from good governance. 

But reputation risk is real, and while there are people who are prepared to misreport or distort the facts about public services – normally but not exclusively in an attempt to get at the politicians who run them- public bodies will need to be in a position to refute those stories.  More controversially  perhaps, they are also entitled, by honest means, to try and stop things becoming stories in the first place.   The alternative is to accept that public bodies will be permanently hampered by people prepared to bend the facts to get in their way. That cannot be in the public interest.

It is vital that the things our public bodies and politicians do is tested and scrutinised.  The danger – a danger I think to our whole political system – is when the whole conduct of political affairs becomes a battle between media people and spin doctors.   The world depicted in The Thick of It, accurate or not, is a world in which this has happened.