With the Frenchman off the speaker circuit, all sorts of peculiar people are being asked to take his place on podiums

SINCE SATURDAY, May 14th, when a chambermaid at the Sofitel hotel in New York claimed she was the victim of attempted rape, the law of unintended consequences has been hard at work.

Some of these consequences have been rather large. With Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, holed up with an armed guard watching him 24 hours a day, the crisis in the euro zone looks even worse than before.

Some of the consequences are rather small. Now that the Frenchman is off the speaker circuit, all sorts of peculiar people are being asked to take his place on various podiums around the world.

Last Tuesday, I received such an invitation. It came from a man who runs a course in diversity and inclusion at Sciences Po, the elite French university.

He explained that DSK had been approached to talk to the students but that “Regarding the latest events, I have started to look for a new keynote speaker”. The upshot: could I step into the breach instead?

This has to be the oddest e-mail I’ve ever received. DSK is not the obvious person to talk about diversity. Indeed, if you think of a Venn diagram, and put him in one circle and the worthy agenda of diversity in another, there would be no overlap.

But even if there was no mistake in asking the ex-head of the IMF to talk on the subject, what desperate, scattergun process led from him to me?

Though I haven’t yet replied, I’m inclined to say no, partly because the thought of DSK is putting me off. It’s not because I don’t fancy stepping into the shoes of a man accused of a very serious sexual assault, which he denies.

The problem is simply that I don’t like the idea of deputising for someone who was sorting out the financial crisis and might have been president of France.

There is a delicate psychological etiquette to inviting people to do things when they are second choice. The man from Sciences Po hasn’t quite got it right.

The first rule is to pretend that the person being asked is your first choice, even if they are your 50th.

Everyone, even people who pretend to be above such vanities, likes to think they are special. I turned down something the other day simply because I’d been told another columnist, whose work is beyond feeble, had been asked first. It may be pathetic, but it’s how it goes.

There is a second rule that sometimes overrides the first. It says that you can – and should – mention the name of the first-choice candidate when they are unambiguously more important or talented than the second. Thus the invitation will flatter the also-ran into thinking they are in elevated company.

This second principle should mean that it is the greatest honour to be asked to step into the shoes of someone as big as DSK. But actually it isn’t. He is far too many miles above me in the pecking order for such a principle to work.

To stand in for someone like him feels too random to be flattering. And to give such a speech would be a pleasure to no one: if you think you are going to be addressed by one of the most important men in the world, you aren’t going to be terribly happy to listen to a jobbing journalist instead.

There is, however, a more powerful reason for saying no to the invitation. The man from Sciences Po tells me that my name had been mentioned to him as the Financial Times’s “expert on DI”.

The truth of the matter is that I’m so far from being an expert, I couldn’t at first think what DI was. I’ve subsequently worked it out, but don’t have much new or interesting to say about diversity; less on inclusion; and nothing at all to say about the two initials smugly sitting there separated by an ampersand as if they were something everyone’s heard of, like BB or SM or GT.

But before I dispatch my refusal, I’m having another thought. Maybe this very invitation, with its weird juxtaposition of Sciences Po, DI and DSK, does give me something new to say about diversity, after all.

On the one hand, it shows that the onward march of the politically correct diversity agenda, with its devotion to the advancement of women and ethnic minorities, has proceeded so far that students at one of the most intellectually rigorous universities in France study it as an academic subject.

But at the same time, out of the ivory tower and back in the real world, a man who led an institution in one of the most politically correct countries in the world stands accused, not of perpetuating the glass ceiling, but of dragging an African woman across the floor.– (copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2011)