To mea culpa via Cloaca Maxima

The sight of Dennis Stevenson – Lord Stevenson of Coddenham – in front of MPs yesterday recalled the heady days of new Labour, when he was a central go-between, even the gateway, for Labour’s then new love affair with business.

Stevenson symbolises the consultant, a breed of service provider born of the late 1960s and which came to ultimate, if short-lived, power in the 1990s. He even named his consultancy Cloaca Maxima (Latin for “public sewer” in Roman times). The good lord was not beyond a sense of irony – although these days the name of his company is omitted from his Who’s Who entry.

Dennis Stevenson was quite simply a consultant who rose and rose until one day he flew just a shade too close to the sun. A former chairman of Pearson and of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (i.e. the enlisting of new faces for the cross benches in the lords), he was listed in 1999 by the Press Association as number 24 in its top 50 powerful people. In 2004 Times Online ranked him at number eight in its Power 100 list.

Not any more he isn’t. Chairmanship of the Halifax for this unqualified banker (his own words) took him to a banking summit from which the fall was more dramatic than any. When HBOS was forged in the merger with Bank of Scotland, he became the chairman of the whole enterprise.

And the rest came to a messy heap on the floor of the very parliament where once he had enjoyed such influence. Is Dennis Stevenson the personification of our febrile times?