Barclays is pulling out of its sponsorship of London's bike hire scheme. It should never have been allowed to have it in the first place. Bringing private money into the public sphere effectively makes the capital one giant advertising hoarding. London has become a city whose streets are paved with turquoise, advertising a bank that, as it turned out, had been misselling financial services and fiddling the interbank lending rate.
Like its first cousin, celebrity endorsement, it is a notoriously tricky business. Banks, it's been plain for some time, are not a great deal more reliable as business partners than sports stars, supermodels and singers, possibly for the same reason. An abundance of self-belief seems to encourage the propensity for risky behaviours along with the sense of infallibility. It's easy to conjure up an image of the newly elected mayor of London Boris Johnson cutting a deal with then Barclays boss Bob Diamond, insulated from reality by an atmosphere thick with hubris.
It's obvious what was in it for the bank. For a mere £50m, which is a tiny fraction of the actual cost of running the scheme, its brand was to be – pun alert – pedalled around the capital for at least five years. A kind of redemption-through-association, a bank in need of a better image hitched to a clean, green transport policy. Now that painting blue lines on the road is recognised as a less than adequate cycling policy, it's off.
But if it was win-win for Barclays, at least to start with, it was anything but for London. As the London assembly observed in its report last year on Transport for London's sponsorship policy, no consideration seemed to have been given either to the possibility of the project becoming a bigger and more valuable asset than was appreciated when the deal was struck and the project had not yet been launched – nor to the reverse prospect of the sponsor losing its sparkle and spreading reputational damage all down the cycle superhighway.
This should be the great awakening, and not just for London. The Barclays sponsorship deal was never just an advertisement for a bank's brand. It was an advertisement for a political one too. Boris has never pretended being mayor is anything other than a trial run for being prime minister. Running London is partly about advertising himself and partly about offering a taster for Boris's Britain. At least it won't be coloured turquoise now.
But it's not just Boris who wants to shrink the state by removing it from its proper place at the heart of public life. And it's not only the mayor who's discovering that it has its limits. Michael Gove's education project is looking a little tawdry this morning as the schools inspector questions the value for money of the rush to free schools imposed by the education secretary's ambition to make his political mark. They look even more questionable as the final meltdown of one of Sweden's big private equity owned education providers takes place, leaving thousands of schoolchildren without schools to go to and all the political parties frantically working up a whole new education policy.
Maybe where Barclays is going, others will follow. Now there, as the bank used to say, is a thought.
