So when the BBC approached me to see what I could offer for the Reith Lectures, I suggested that I could look more broadly at trust and accountability, particularly in the professions and the public sector. In the lectures I argue that having misdiagnosed what ails British society we are now busy prescribing copious draughts of the wrong medicine. We are imposing ever more stringent forms of control. We are requiring those in the public sector and the professions to account in excessive and sometimes irrelevant detail to regulators and inspectors, auditors and examiners. The very demands of accountability often make it harder for them to serve public sector.

Our revolution in accountability has not reduced attitudes of mistrust, but rather reinforced a culture of suspicion. Instead of working towards intelligent accountability based on good governance, independent inspection and careful reporting, we are galloping towards central planning by performance indicators, reinforced by obsessions with blame and compensation. This is pretty miserable both for those who feel suspicious and for those who are suspected of untrustworthy action - sometimes with little evidence.

In the Reith Lectures I outline a much more practical view of trust. The lectures are not about attitudes of trust, but about actively placing and refusing trust and the sorts of evidence we need if we are to place trust well. Far from suggesting that we should trust blindly, I argue that we should place trust with care and discrimination, and that this means that we need to pay more attention to the accuracy of information provided to the public. Placing trust well can never guarantee immunity from breaches of trust: life does not provide guarantees. There is no total answer to the old question ‘Who shall guard the guardians?’, and there is no way of eliminating all risk of disappointment. Nevertheless, many of us would agree with Samuel Johnson “it is better to be sometimes cheated than never to have trusted”.

If we are to reduce the culture of suspicion, many changes will be needed. We will need to give up childish fantasies that we can have total guarantees of others’ performance. We will need to free professionals and the public service to serve the public. We will need to work towards more intelligent forms of accountability. We will need to rethink a media culture in which spreading suspicion has become a routine activity, and to move towards a robust configuration of press freedom that is appropriate to twenty first century communications technology. This won’t be easy. We have placed formidable obstacles in our own path: it is time to start removing them.