Why didn’t financial journalists blow the whistle on Paul Flowers? Robert Peston can’t tell you

As I listened to Robert Peston early last Friday fluffing on about the Revd Paul Flowers and the possible effect of his indiscretions on the future of the Co-operative Bank, I couldn’t help wondering why none of the financial journalists smelt a rat when Flowers took over as chairman of the once-dependable, now-fragile bank. The former Methodist minister, it is now emerging, has made a career out of duping those who employ him. He’s evidently a conman of considerable talent, but even so it’s incredible that none of the BBC’s keen-eyed investigators into the City and matters financial thought it worthwhile to check out Flowers once it was known that the bank was so surprisingly and shockingly in trouble. After all, this was the question that those outside the City were asking: how could such incompetence have occurred? Why did no one in the bank realise that it was walking straight into the current catastrophe? And why did none of the so-called experts comment on its decisions?

Peston, who was talking to Mishal Husain on the Today programme (Radio 4), began so tentatively that his characteristically wayward progress through the English language was even more erratic than usual.