”I don’t quit. I’m a fighter.” Yes, it sounds like the last gasp of a soon-to-be-fired candidate on The Apprentice, but those are the words of Gillian Bowler at Friday’s Irish Life & Permanent agm. She said pretty much the same thing in March, so it’s obviously a line that works for her, and as if to prove it she chose to wear this very on-trend sharp-shouldered leather jacket for her big day.
Watching Bowler being interviewed by Bryan Dobson, colleagues in the office wondered whether a leather jacket was appropriate for a senior banker. (Yes, we like to lighten the mood on a Friday evening by dissecting the wardrobe of one of the few female denizens of the Irish corporate elite.) Of course, the answer was contained within the question: who in their right mind would want to dress like a banker these days? Where once greed oozed from their top pockets, now egg drips down their pinstripes and their supply of corporate branded golf umbrellas remains safely stashed in plastic.
But the point about the shoulder-padded jacket is that it was fashion armour. It allowed Bowler to sound contrite - ”obviously, I’m ashamed of that episode” - and yet still look like she’d be capable of knocking over any dissenters with one swift swivel of her torso - “98 per cent of [shareholders] asked me stay”. And the great thing about leather, as all sofa-buying parents know, is that it’s just so very wipeable… you know, should it unceremoniously come into contact with something sticky.
I didn’t catch the live show, but most newspaper reports have concluded that Bowler, sans her sunglasses gimmick, put in a good performance at the agm, declining to resign or sacrifice her salary with consummate ease. One shareholder who took the mic to criticise her was even reported to have been booed by other shareholders, which is quite astonishing when you think about how much paper money and pension money that the agm attendees have collectively lost under Bowler’s watch.
For outsiders, i.e. those with no stake in what happens to Irish Life, it’s perhaps easier to believe that someone is doing the honourable thing by not resigning when they’re still best known for being in the business of offering people cheap package holidays, not overseeing the destruction of their savings or bankrupting them with 100 per cent mortgages.
Bowler, like the most effusive Apprentice candidates, David Cameron or the entire PR profession for that matter, knows that it is not the mistake that you make but the way in which you handle the aftermath that is all anyone seems to care about these days. It is the appearance of being decisive, not whether the decisions are the right ones, that counts. When Cameron got up early on Tuesday and told reporters that he was personally very ”angry” about “out of order” moat-dredging, chandelier-fixing expense claims by Conservative MPs and was “going to deal with it”, by the end of the day the BBC and Sky News were agreeing that he had scored political points, not lost them. Already, the British media had stopped talking about the Tory squirearchy’s toxic, taxpayer-funded lives of lavish entitlement and had moved the story on to a more simplistic Cameron v Brown, round 487.
I found that bizarre to watch, but then we indulge in a similar kind of selective short-term memory when we find ourselves admiring Bowler for her cool poise… or distracted by her sartorial confidence. Sure, “someone had to stay on and clear up the mess”, but should retaining a well-paid position despite a major scandal really sound so much like doing everyone a favour? Bowler has distanced herself from the €7.5 billion Anglo Irish Bank deposit transfer, among IL&P’s other failings, but should she be allowed to?
