The circumstances surrounding the departure of Jeremy Colman were strange when first announced, but are becoming stranger. Using a workplace laptop to download pornography is certainly a serious enough disciplinary matter in any organization, and especially a public organization ... but if downloading pornography itself were an offence, then probably half the male population would be guilty of it.
Therefore the news that he has been arrested was rather more sinister, and the Evening Standard in London has today made the specific allegation that he has been arrested for possessing indecent images of children.
Spending watchdog arrested over child porn
If this is indeed true, then he deserves all that the law can throw at him. However the risk is that by looking only at this man's personal conduct, we might overlook the situation in the Wales Audit Office itself. This is a much more important matter for Wales as a whole.
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The WAO would appear to be rife with internal difficulties, as reported here, and when the story first broke it appeared to me that the pornography was the straw that broke the camel's back, a convenient pretext to get rid of the head of one of the "factions" within the management structure. But we must not simply assume that because Jeremy Colman himself has gone, everything in the WAO will now be alright. His personal predilections may well—I say that because nothing has yet been proved—be despicable, but that would not necessarily mean that the ideas of his faction in the senior management structure of the WAO are similarly discredited.
I would hope that the Assembly, and in particular the Public Accounts Committee, take this opportunity to do more that simply replace the person at the top. We need to step back and take a long hard look at the way this body is structured and how it does its work.
