Knights in yellow jumpsuits

They should be made to wear a yellow jumpsuit when they do their community sentence and clean-ups, and it should be published in the paper so people can go and look at them and say, 'Oh, how the mighty have fallen'.

Two former NZ Ministers of Justice, with a third director of Lombard Finance, have been found guilty of making false statements to investors about the company’s position. Sir Douglas Graham is one of the three and he was chairman of the Lombard board. Douglas Graham was National MP for Remuera, and always seemed to me the handsome epitome of Remuera’s abiding satisfaction with itself.

And so the media are rounding up investors who have lost some or all of their life savings with Lombard. Mr Paul Wah wants Sir Douglas stripped of his knighthood. “How can a knight of the realm be ... not a common criminal but someone guilty of criminal conduct?" the pensioner asked. "My fondest wish would be to see those guys on bread and water for a few years." Well I imagine the ranks of knighthood would be somewhat reduced if white collar and other criminals were excluded.

It was Gino Zambon who proposed the very public humiliation with which we began. And indeed, if you have seen the foundations of your retirement ripped away, the money you had put together through years of work and planning… If you had placed the funds with Lombard partly because of the reputation of these men… If in later years you now have to find other ways to afford to live, including rising medical costs…

Sir Douglas himself lost money, we are informed -- he reinvested $12,000 of $17,000 of matured debentures in October 2007, and also held a small stake in Lombard Group, then NZX-listed. Well it might have been prudent not to have advanced this information. Mr Wah invested his six-figure life savings in Lombard, and is probably unimpressed if Sir Douglas thinks he is sharing the pain.

Granny Herald, always helpful, supplies us with an interesting list of knights who have been stripped. I cannot imagine how Sir Douglas now feels being listed with Albert Henry of the Cook Islands, Morgan Fahey the disgraced former Christchurch Deputy Mayor, Frank Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Robert Mugabe -- and Jeffrey Archer who actually got to keep his life peerage in the end.

But it hasn’t happened yet, and I doubt that it will. Sir Douglas was knighted not for his financial leadership, but for the very effective work he did over the years while Minister of Justice in Treaty of Waitangi settlements. It was good work, and it would be ridiculous to take that away from him.

I confess to being as uneasy as ever when responsible media so eagerly give an airing to the irrational anger of victims. The anger is perhaps understandable, but not always. It ought to be possible for Mr Wah and Mr Zambon to see what kind of society we would have if we followed their punitive prescriptions. It ought to be possible for the NZ Herald to review the ways they select what they are going to report. It ought to be possible to distinguish between fury and sensible legal outcomes. And it ought to be easy enough to see that gross deliberate public humiliation of people (as though the directors of Lombard had not suffered enough of it already) is actually barbaric.