The fall out over Global Counsel’s collapse has been seen as an ‘ end of an era’ watershed for the lobbying industry. Various post-mortems have been offered – not least by GC’s former managing editor Ben Brogan on LinkedIn – as to why Global Counsel sunk so quickly, like a corporate advisory Titanic. When Rebecca Park was first appointed as the new CEO on February 6th, chairman Archie Norman made a statement suggesting that he thought the 16 year old firm could shore up its client base and survive.

After all, the firm had been surpassing commercial expectations under Ben Wegg-Prosser and was expanding. But that turned out to be wishful thinking and it folded in what Politico called a week of ‘dramatic and sudden disintegration’ to leave around 100 employees in London, Brussels and Washington looking for new jobs.

When Rebecca Park was appointed on February 6th, a statement by Archie Norman tried to put a final line under the matter of his shares by saying his stake would be divested that very same day (with Rebecca Park and others presumably taking up the shares). But for a firm that is meant to be expert at reputation management, it seems extraordinary that it took so long for the firm to get rid of Mandelson’s significant shareholding. As a result, the fervent claims by GC staff that Mandelson had nothing to do with the first failed on an optical level.

This ‘optics failure’ …