Comment: TSB directors are deliberately misreading the book of their failures

To book club members, it never ceases to amaze how two people can read the same novel and interpret them so differently. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles got what was coming to her? Really?”

A similar sense of bafflement emerges today in the responses to Slaughter & May’s War and Peace job on TSB’s IT debacle.

To the ordinary reader, it’s a well-researched exposé of a disgracefully lax board. The cast of characters at TSB are depicted failing abjectly to enquire if the biggest, most complex IT transfer ever attempted was actually going to work. This, the average reader deduces, was in part naivety, but in the main due to conflicts arising from the board’s new Spanish paymasters doing the job.

But from the directors themselves comes a very different reading. First, chairman Richard Meddings and CEO at the time Paul Pester unite in criticising the work. Meddings says it’s plain wrong that directors didn’t ask enough questions. He says lots of customer data transferred smoothly prior to the big switchover day and can’t understand how the authors failed to address those facts.

Pester picks on flaws in the narrative structure (a typical book clubber’s complaint) but eagerly alights on the plotline where shady Sabadell keeps TSB in the dark about how lax its dry-run testing has been. Exonerated! Pester cries. We could never have guessed anything was awry.

Hardly. This was the tale of a set of directors either reckless or out of their depth, compromised by an overbearing new owner. The many customers who suffered will be unanimous in that interpretation.