IT'S always fun when bank bigwigs are dragged in front of the microphones.
One American captive, dragged in front of cameras for propaganda purposes, blinked a message in Morse code.
"What's really scaring people is the prospect of getting dragged in front of a Congressional hearing," said Bradley W. Burwell, a senior associate at CB Richard Ellis Hotels.
Business people have been dragged in front of MPs for much less, yet Ashley's appearance did not happen without a fight.
Or again when Johnson in the Senate volume just tars and tarnishes a politician who is perfectly innocent but dragged in front of hearings and it's sort of McCarthy-like.
Even on the occasions (both then and since) when the bank CEOs have been dragged in front of Congress for what have become almost ritual attempts to humiliate and shame them, most of those efforts have been failures.
I certainly wasn't expecting to be dragged in front of the entire audience and made to lie on my back with Gunn flat on top of me for a good two minutes.
Today, in a quicker about-face than an MP dragged in front of the courts for fiddling his expenses, there are calls from senior politicians for the West to adopt Assad as an ally in the fight against the fanatics of the so-called Islamic State (IS).
It's the newest parliamentary ritual, now as fixed as the Churchill statue in the lobby and the old cry of "who goes home?" Someone in charge of an enterprise in trouble – a bank, perhaps, or G4S, or in this case the BBC – is dragged in front of a select committee and humiliated.
Certainly, by placing the responsibility on lawyers to get the right outcomes for their clients - including longer term outcomes, such as avoiding getting dragged in front of public inquiries - the new regime is likely to increase the incentive for note-sharing in advance of the taking of big decisions.
