Alf Young on Thursday: When it comes to brass-necked denial and platinum-plated chutzpah in the face of reality, some of our leading business figures can show our senior politicians a fresh trick or two

When it comes to brass-necked denial and platinum-plated chutzpah in the face of reality, some of our leading business figures can show our senior politicians a fresh trick or two. Consider the current UK president of the CBI, Martin Broughton, an accountant whose main day job happens to be chairman of British Airways.

Last week, BA's chief executive Willie Walsh was rightly applauded for refusing to take an annual bonus of some £700,000, a bonus to which he was perfectly entitled on overall performance.Walsh considered it appropriate to take full responsibility for the botched opening of Heathrow's Terminal 5, where thousands of BA passengers saw travel plans disrupted and their baggage mislaid. Walsh was widely praised, in part because such voluntary gestures of boardroom contrition are far too rare.

However, when Broughton welcomed the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, to the CBI's annual dinner at Grosvenor House on Monday evening, contrition was the last thing on his mind. These are turbulent economic times. And some of the strongest headwinds have been whipped up not by governments but by the shameful excesses of the global financial system, turning the dross end of the US mortgage market into AAA-rated securities and polluting confidence in mainstream credit markets in the process.

Big boardrooms, and their blindness to the massive risks they were undertaking, created the massive bubble that has now burst. One might have expected the CBI president to acknowledge that demonstrable fact. And exhibit some humility, on their behalf.

Not a bit of it. With seasoned investors, like George Soros, warning the likely impact on the global economy remains highly significant but unquantifiable, Broughton went out of his way to minimise the consequences. "This is not a catastrophe, it is a reality check," came the reassuring soundbite. Others may be speculating about the chances of outright recession. The CBI doesn't want us to even contemplate such an outcome.

"If we wanted to talk ourselves into a recession, it would not be hard to start the conversation," he observed. "My concern is that it would quickly become impossible to stop it. So let us talk not about what might go wrong. Let us not even talk about what has gone wrong already. This is not a time for finding scapegoats."

There may be turbulence out there. It could get a lot worse. Broughton doesn't even want to acknowledge it's there. "This is not a time for the captain to turn on the seatbelt sign," came the BA chairman's rather ill-judged attempt at an airline analogy.

How does Broughton judge the significance of the credit crunch then? Judging by that little gag, he doesn't seem to think it will spill a single gin-and-tonic into a single passenger's lap. Later he did manage to acknowledge that there had been excesses. Money had been wasted. Investments will have to be written off. "But let's face it. Most of us, and most of the companies we work for, have had a fantastic run of success over the past ten years."

So that's all right then. The UK government had to nationalise one bank. And throw as much as £100bn at ungumming credit markets. Shareholders are having to shell out more billions in rights issues to rebuild dangerously-thin capital reserves. But think what a good time we've had for a decade. Let's see if we can get the merrygo-round up and running again.

The tactic couldn't be clearer. Now that governments have already coughed up to limit the initial fall-out, let's make sure those politicians, who do have to face voters over their mistakes, don't try and impede the onwards and upwards march of markets.

The CBI president explicitly warned his principal political guest against regulatory retaliation or making business "the fiscal fall-guy". He had a particular go at Darling over an increasingly costly, complex and capricious corporate tax system in the UK.

The Chancellor arrived at the dinner intent on being emollience personified. He told them how British business is the foundation on which all our prosperity is built, but he didn't tell them, as someone like Soros certainly would have, that the claim that markets, left unfettered, will always tend towards equilibrium is now palpably false, that there are justifiable prices financial markets will now have to pay in improved regulation and a move away from a system that sees rewarding those who run it more and more handsomely the principal objective.

Broughton did business no real favours by implying the only credible answer to what has happened since last summer is business as usual. The issues that have been exposed by the credit crunch are too important to be left just to those who created them in the first place.