Simon English: How a private matter sprouts into a scandal

The 1988 Prefab Sprout song Moving the River starts: “You surely are a truly gifted kid/But you’re only good as/The last great thing you did/And where’ve you been since then/Did the schedule get you down/I hear you’ve got a new girlfriend/How’s the wife taking it?”

António Horta-Osório probably isn’t a Prefab Sprout fan but that song might speak to him.

The Lloyds chief executive is a truly gifted kid but the schedule may be getting him down, almost as much as the share price (a flaky 55p, down from nearly 90p 18 months ago).

As for the girlfriend, well, that’s just embarrassment all round, isn’t it?

Tomorrow, Lloyds presents its third-quarter results, a chance to show that Britain’s most important bank is unruffled by Brexit, a source of national solidity. Sadly, there lurks in the background, the foreground and all around, the late summer tabloid exposé that had Horta-Osório abroad in a hotel room with a woman who dared not to be his wife.

It’s the sort of story Brits love — a rich banker behaving like millions of others, and getting caught. The supposed justification for the story is that Lloyds is still partly owned by the taxpayer, raising the question of whether the money spent on his lover was ours.

Hardly anyone, certainly not me, wants to ask Horta-Osório about the state of his marriage. Sadly, Lloyds rather legitimised the questions by taking the exposé seriously.

You could say the affair at least provides a distraction from Lloyds’ spectacular PPI mis-selling bill — £16 billion and rising. But it should never have gone this far.

The bank did an investigation; it “undertook a review”. Words such as “compliance” were bandied around. A strict “no comment whatsoever” was all that was needed here. Once you’ve answered one question about lurid issues, you’re open to the rest. Is he back with his wife? Or not? Tabloids will feel entitled to keep asking. Big companies have form here and it’s all poor. Back in 2009, Aviva boss Andrew Moss was exposed for a work affair. He left his wife of 25 years; she left her husband, who also worked for Aviva. The insurer decided it needed to probe whether Moss had broken company rules. He probably had, leading to the conclusion that the company rules are stupid, and that having rules for people’s love lives is a route to idiocy.

Moss was pictured in the press looking like a man in crisis and wearing the sort of suit his wife would have advised against were she still talking to him. Before long he was gone and no great loss to the stock market, but he had every right to be furious with Aviva for making a private matter so public.

The taxpayer only owns 9% of Lloyds, so you could say that in a few months’ time, once those shares are finally sold Horta-Osório’s private life could be just that again. If he had held off on that hotel booking, he’d have been alright.

In the meantime, if Horta-Osório decides he’s had enough after more than five years at the helm of Lloyds and needs some time back home, no one could blame him.