Journalists have worked themselves into a self-righteous lather this week following The Sunday Times’ shocking revelation that the Government’s City Minister, Lord Paul Myners, set up an off-shore insurance business. Cries of ‘resign’ and ‘hypocrite’ have resounded through the media. Lord Myners is, after all,  leading a taskforce to stamp out corporate tax avoidance.

But hang on a sec’. Isn’t the fact that Lord Myners was formerly chairman of Bermuda-based Aspen one of the worst kept secrets in history? In fact, it isn’t a secret at all;  it’s public knowledge. Most people in the London insurance market, including its journalists, are only too familar with Lord Myners’s role at Aspen until he stepped down in 2007. So why did The Sunday Times treat the story of Lord Myners and Aspen as though some dark secert had been revealed through months of in-depth investigative journalism?

The answer is that, in reality, there are an awful lot of things that national  journalists don’t know but that practitioners in any given trade or industry take for granted.  Most business journalists working on the nationals will be au fait with Myners’s past; the problem is that their colleagues on the political desks are not – and they are the ones pushing this story. Were one to ask a denizen of Leadenhall Street whether the Myners-Aspen story merited coverage, their answer would probably be a bemused ‘no’.

While there is some merit to the charge of hypocrisy, it is questionable whether the story deserves the prominence given to it by The Sunday Times’ exposé-style front page and accompanying leader column. What is clear is that any attempt by the media to give the impression that Myners  tried to conceal his connection to Aspen is utterly unwarranted. The information was in the public domain and about as widely available as it’s possible to be. How much investigative journalism is required to pump ‘Myners Aspen’ into Google?

Surely if anything should give rise to concern, it’s the ability of the national media to feign ignorance of a Government minister’s CV, and then present information from it as a major revelation – even though its business reporters were only too familiar with the facts. To prove the point, click here for a profile of Myners in the Times from 2005 which names him as chairman of Aspen Re.

Written by Adrian Beeby