I am in breach of my employer’s code of conduct. I have broken it in not one but in four different ways, one of which involved barefaced lying.

The normal thing would be to keep quiet about this, but I am choosing to shop myself, partly because I have reason to believe I am in good company but also because the real wrongdoing was not done by me, but by the codes themselves — which breach the principles of common sense, human motivation, and snappy writing.

Codes of conduct are scary things. Charlotte Hogg, who helped write the Bank of England’s code and who is also an adviser to my charity, still managed to get tripped up by it and this month had to resign as deputy governor. Seeing what happened to her, I decided to do something I had never done before: settle down to read my own.