So, Bob Diamond has resigned from Barclays. That wasn’t really unexpected, except possibly by Bob himself. It would be interesting to know exactly what it was that triggered his change of mind, after initially being so determined to stay on.

You can read the press release announcing his departure on the Barclays website. It’s the usual kind of “sorry but not sorry” guff, where the resigner accepts that he has to resign for the good of the company but declines to accept that it’s his own fault which led to it. But one sentance stands out as particularly risible. After telling us how disappointed he is by recent events, Diamond goes on to say

I know that each and every one of the people at Barclays works hard every day to serve our customers and clients.

That’s just tosh. It would be tosh even in the normal course of events. Barclays, like every organistion with more than a handful of employees, undoubtedly has its share of shirkers and numpties. Some of them work in call centres or in branches. Some of them work in IT, or marketing. So Bob Diamond certainly doesn’t “know” that everyone at Barclays works hard every day to serve customers and clients. I’m sure he doesn’t even think that; he knows as well as I do that some of his customer-facing staff aren’t up to scratch. That’s just the normal way of things in any large organisation.

But it goes beyond that here. Maybe Bob Diamond needs to remind himself of why he resigned: because of the actions of his staff in making false statements regarding inter-bank borrowing rates. As he himself says in his letter to the Treasurey Select Committee:

Barclays traders attempted to influence the bank’s submissions in order to try to benefit their own desks’ trading position.

This is, of course, wholly inappropriate behaviour.

He’s right, of course. It is “wholly inappropriate behaviour”. It isn’t the behaviour of people working hard to serve customers and clients. It’s the behaviour of people fraudulently manipulating the financial markets for their own reward. And Bob Diamond knows it. That’s why he’s joining the ranks of the unemployed (at least temporarily; I doubt there’s any need to feel sorry for him).

So why not recognise that fact in his resignation statement? Why tell a blatant untruth about how hard working and customer focussed all his (former) staff are?

You could argue that he’s uttering nothing more than the usual resignation letter platitudes. But that doesn’t wash here. Bob Diamond isn’t resigning because of some private scandal like being caught cottaging on Clapham Common or perverting the course of justice to avoid a speeding ticket. He’s resigning because the staff that he was supposed to be responsible for were engaged in systematic fraud on a grand scale.

Whether he himself was sufficiently close to that fraud to be personally accountable for it is another matter, and it will take much more investigation to uncover the truth of that. But whether he was a contributory participant or not, this is not the time for platitudes and false expressions of loyalty. The absence of any ‘mea culpa’ from Bob Diamond merely serves to underline how necessary it was for him to resign.