The CBI is just papering over the cracks – and it shows

The once-powerful institution is not what it was. This isn’t new and has nothing to do with the current scandal, writes Chris Blackhurst

The appointment of Rain Newton-Smith as director general feels like a rush job (Bloomberg/Getty)

Let me say, loud and clear, I am not flying a flag for Tony Danker. I’ve met him several times, liked him, but that’s it.

For all I know his conduct while director-general of the CBI might have been so gross that the board of the organisation felt it had no choice but to summarily fire him.

While I’m just hypothesising, in a way, I hope so. Because how else to explain the speed of his sacking?

If it was, then Danker must be delusional, since he said in a statement he was “shocked to learn that I had been dismissed from the CBI, instead of being invited to put my position forward as was originally confirmed”. Many of the allegations, he said, were “distorted”. He added: “I recognise that I unintentionally made a number of colleagues feel uncomfortable and I am truly sorry about that.”

Danker, 51, and paid £376,000 in 2021, is going without severance pay but presumably the CBI can now expect a legal claim. In which case, the body should ensure its ducks really are in a row.

The suspicion is that the CBI directors acted in haste, that the accusations stacking up against their organisation, many of which predated Danker, were so severe and voluminous as to threaten its very existence.

By ditching Danker so quickly, they may have be looking to draw a line, to present to the world, to members wondering about withdrawing and prospective members running for the hills, an instant, fresh, more acceptable face. They’ve got that in Danker’s successor, Rain Newton-Smith, the CBI’s former chief economist.

Tony Danker addresses the annual CBI conference in November (AFP/Getty)

Here again, the organisation’s behaviour smacks of rushing to plaster over the cracks. Newton-Smith may be ideally suited, certainly she clearly knows the place. But is she the best choice; what sort of selection procedure was followed?

Appointing a woman will head off critics, but is an economist what the CBI needs, now and in the immediate future?

It’s a once-powerful institution that has totally lost its mojo. This isn’t new and has nothing to do with the current scandal. The CBI has been losing it for years. Looking back, its last chiefs that carried weight and influence were Digby Jones, a former Birmingham lawyer and Richard Lambert, the ex-FT editor.

The CBI has been lost in a morass of indecision, policy wonkery and, odd, considering what has dragged it down recently, wokeness

Both were different characters with contrasting styles of leadership. Jones ran the CBI from 2000 to 2006, Lambert from 2006 to 2011. Jones was direct and pugnacious, determined to fight the business employers’ corner. Lambert was quieter, more cerebral, but equally effective in making ministers, media and public sit up and listen.

Under their tenure, the CBI annual dinner was worth attending, senior politicians would be there in force and also several of the country’s leading entrepreneurs. They don’t go now and neither do they show up at the annual conference.

A stronger leader would, for example, have taken the struggle to Boris Johnson when he was prime minister. Johnson, who was little concerned with the views of business, despite his predilection for donning a hi-vis jacket and hard hat and wanting to be photographed at a construction site or on a factory floor.

Johnson, you always thought, regarded commerce as something below stairs, consigned to the tradesman’s entrance, not to be taken seriously. His “Peppa Pig” speech to the CBI conference, while rightly lauding the UK’s creative industries, was so rambling and clearly off-the-cuff as to be insulting. It’s hard to imagine Digby Jones or even the less fizzy Lambert would have taken it lying down, they would have gone on the attack and turned on Johnson.

Boris Johnson is greeted by Tony Danker at their annual conference in 2021 (Getty)

Since their day, the CBI has been lost in a morass of indecision, policy wonkery and, odd, considering what has dragged it down recently, wokeness. It’s impossible to recall anything memorable it’s done or said. Meanwhile, businesses have been hit by the pandemic, broken supply lines, post-Brexit bureaucracy, lack of suitable labour, rising costs, energy shortages… the list goes on.

Rather than Newton-Smith, a better replacement for Danker might have been a corporate boss who could speak from experience about the problems the UK business community faces and how to make life for the country’s 190,000 businesses easier and more productive.

Ideally, yes, a woman would help. But that should not matter – more important is the ability to engage with a government that has not fulfilled its promises towards the commercial sector, that still treats business as a target for tax while not doing enough to remove unnecessary red tape and equip employers with school-leavers and other recruits who possess the skills they require.

Of course, finding such a person would have taken time – time, presumably, the CBI president Brian McBride and his colleagues felt they did not have.

But that’s what executive search is for. While they felt under pressure to act quickly, recruiting the right person surely carried more merit. It would be a pity if they came to regret anointing Newton-Smith, and by then, if they did, things would be looking pretty bleak if not terminal.

They won’t be able to claim either that the hiring was not their doing, that the headhunters came up with the new director general. For a group of directors well versed in the wily ways of boardrooms and the art of passing the buck, they may just have committed a cardinal error.