Since 1991 at least a dozen national leaders-from the Prince of Wales to England’s top military man to government policy-makers have been laid low by sex scandals. Most of them have promptly resigned (chart), but it wasn’t always thus. William Gladstone, the 19th-century British statesman, once remarked that he’d known 11 prime ministers and seven were adulterers. None had to resign as a result. Old Westminster hands are shaken by the new puritanism. “It’s getting ridiculous,” one Tory minister said last week. “It seems there’s a policy of one bonk and you’re out.”
Pennant-Rea had been Synon’s boss as editor of The Economist until 1993, and had made, said his resignation letter last week, “foolish mistakes.” But public hypocrisy wasn’t at issue; he was not a politician who had called for sexual morality. Pennant-Rea was just a banker tweedy, dull at parties, but brilliant enough at his new job to confound the critics who thought he wouldn’t be up to it. Lamented the Financial Times: “It is, in all, a typically British story, about a country that cares far more for appearances than for achievements.” The Sunday Mirror said the public had a right to know what people “on public salaries are doing on office time and office premises.” But Synon admitted her motive was revenge. “Somebody said yesterday that there are no winners in this thing,” she wrote in the tabloid Evening Standard the day after PennantRea quit. “True. But now there is more than one loser.”
