![](https://static.standard.co.uk/2023/08/23/14/newFile-1.jpg?width=1200&auto=webp)
The corporate world is another country. They do things differently there. Yet another big swinging dick has bitten the dust after the board discovered “historical” romantic liaisons he hadn’t reported to them.
This week the head man of Cboe Global Markets, Edward Tilly, has been made to walk the plank for “failing to disclose personal relationships with colleagues”. He started as a clerk on the trading floor in the Windy City in 1987, so Tilly is our Bernard Looney.
As you will recall, BP-lifer Looney — he joined in 1991 aged 21 — was flung into outer darkness after a stellar career also for failing to disclose past relationships; last year the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, stood down after his relationship with a senior colleague was “revealed;” and in 2019, McDonald’s chief executive Steve Easterbrook was fired for having an office affair and last month fined $400,000 for concealing the extent of his consensual affair with a McDonald’s employee.
The Mad Men of yore will be today’s Sad Men if they ever regard female co-workers as Don Draper did, like a free daily buffet
At first blush, this suggests that if you are in a senior position, keep your pants up or you’ll be picking up your P45. The Mad Men of yore will be today’s Sad Men if they ever regard female co-workers as Don Draper did, like a free daily buffet laid on for their personal consumption, even in their dreams.
But actually, the thread that connects all the above cases is not the intra-mural sex itself. It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up.
It’s the fact that these successful highly paid corporates didn’t ‘fess up, for the very same reason that Bill Clinton once blustered that “Ah nevah had sex with that woman”.
One, they thought it was nobody’s business (and I am on their side here; how can someone be expected to cough up about something that’s not merely private but also secret, something moreover that if revealed could end up with you being sacked then divorced? The whole thing is nuts!).
And two, these dogs believed they were too big to fail, that the rules didn’t apply to them, which is less sympathetic.
As I spent last week at a summit in Braemar debating the Great Acceleration we’ve been centrifugally flung into, it’s clear to me that it’s a jungle out there and we all need catching up with the New Rules. A top headhunter provided a helpfully jargon-free starter summary for those who have reached executive committee level.
“It’s quite simple, you cannot shag up, you cannot shag down,” he told me on strict background. “Basically, you cannot shag.” And if you do shag, I’d add, make sure you cover your arse by telling HR.
Murray Auchinloss, the chief financial officer who replaced Looney, is also in a relationship with another BP employee — but he has told the board so that’s OK, then (some firms even demand employees to sign “love contracts”, whereby they must disclose relationships with another employee).
Other New Rules to share are: if you’re a boss, be prompt to leave the office party, don’t engage with junior employees on social media (Tony Danker had to leave the CBI for not that much more), make sure your online past is without stain, assume every email and WhatsApp you send is discoverable, (poor Matt Hancock — his whole phone has been read by all), be punctual, polite, and presentable and, basically, bring your best self to work every day.
Mmm. It’s not realistic, is it?
How does this survive contact with the real world, in which married MPs end up with their secretaries, many rich men are on the look-out for the younger model, up to 75 per cent of employees have had a workplace romance and four out of five of them are kept secret (or, as Forbes magazine has it, “play out without any oversight”)?
Last year, half of forced chief executive departures among the biggest 3,000 US companies were due to personal misconduct. This post #MeToo puritanism has washed up on our shores, and the tide has gone out leaving several top execs already without their swimming trunks.
I saved the harshest New Rule until last. If employees are not comfortable about coughing up about a relationship to their employer, I read in Forbes magazine, it’s a “good sign” that they should avoid or dump the relationship. Oof!
Call me old-fashioned but I met my husband at work — he was older, divorced; I was a twenty-something ex-grad trainee. Isn’t it still better to meet someone at the office canteen rather than on Tinder?
Rachel Johnson is a contributing editor of the Evening Standard.