Hearts & Minds: The moment it’s over. The narrative twists that end careers

Two departures in a week. In both the cases of Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson there was a sense of inevitability, that once the ball started rolling it would be difficult to stop. Even so, in the story arc of a downfall there is often a moment when the potentially salvageable becomes emphatically unsalvageable. So, it proved. With Rayner, it was the small advisory firm saying they were being scapegoated, that they only acted on the material she supplied them. With Mandelson it was the revelation that he urged Jeffrey Epstein to fight for early release. There may be further disclosures, there were certainly several earlier in the piece and Mandelson himself indicated there was more and they would be ‘embarrassing’, but the 'fight for early release' comment was the tipping point.

They conform to a dynamic where an already troubled position or reputation shifts from ‘maybe survivable’ to ‘done for’ because of a fresh, specific detail or misstep.

Prince Andrew also fell due to his relationship with Epstein. But the claims about the Duke of York had been swirling for years, the clincher was his calamitous BBC Newsnight interview. in which he claimed he couldn’t sweat and displayed little empathy for Epstein’s victims. Watergate was slowly rumbling along, until the court mandated the release of tapes proving President Richard Nixon’s direct involvement in the cover-up and destroying his remaining credibility, making resignation certain. Criticism of Matt Hancock’s handling of the pandemic had been building, but the leaked footage of the Health Secretary embracing his aide in his departmental office in breach of his own regulations scuppered any prospect of riding out the storm. Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown was controversial, but his subsequent press conference defence – that he drove all that way ‘to test my eyesight’ – crystallised public outrage and made his position untenable. Gerald Ratner’s jewellery chain was already under some pressure, but his speech ridiculing his own products flipped him from aggressive entrepreneur to national laughingstock, with catastrophic consequences for him and the business.

It does not take much, very little in fact. In crisis comms, tight control of the narrative is all. The slightest deviation can prove fatal.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.