‘One has overspent’ screamed the headline from i, the Independent’s ‘quality tabloid’, thereby putting a flame to the ‘quality’ bit of that Unique Selling Point.

This was the revelation that the royal household hasn’t been too good at balancing its budget, primarily in relation to the cost of maintaining so many Royal garrets up and down the country.

The story itself is piddly – a waste of £2m, while significant to Joe Q Taxpayer, is smaller than the smallest beer at the institutional/corporate/national level. Government departments waste this sort of money through over generous allocation of toilet paper every hour (probably). And anyway, someone won 50 times that much on the Euromillions last year, so live with it.

No, the underlying topic of how this lands in the public sphere is much more interesting. The i’s headline is telling: this mundane tale of some lackey failing to do his sums is turned into a SHOCK! expose that plays (by design?) to a well worn meme: our lords and masters are idiots and/or crooks.

This massaging of events is the harsh reality of what risk people call reputation risk. The term is often watered down to a vague narrative, such as ‘negative media exposure’, which doesn’t really do justice to the toxicity of the issue.

The truth is, I reckon HRH doesn’t really have anything to worry about – her public standing is almost unassailable. Probably second only to Julie Walters who can afford to appear in The Harry Hill Movie without so much as a smudge on her credibility. If you want to find a entity that’s genuinely vulnerable to reputation risk look no further than the Royal Bank of Scotland.

RBS was established in 1727 and spent nearly three centuries building a cachet that one commentator characterised as ‘Corporate Deity’ before watching it plummet to ‘Lower Than Whale Shit’ in a few short years.

The latest press grumblings have to do with executive bonuses – as expected. Such stories at least have the merit of actually being about the organisation. Other reporting can’t claim such distinction: the recent TSB/Lloyds/Bank of Scotland IT outage invited comparison with RBS (it had nothing to do with the firm). Even more bizarrely, a recent piece discussing historical perspectives of the First World war saw fit to gauge the quality of military command with the standard of management in RBS.

When your reputation amounts to being a yardstick for cock-up you know you’ve got a problem. How do you bounce back from that? Time and hard works, perhaps – but don’t be too sure. Just ask British Rail which once, many years ago, claimed ‘leaves on the line’ had been sufficient to disrupt train services. That particular piece of communications genius has become a sort of national shorthand for incompetence and even pops up in the current Audi advert.

For their part, I think Risk people need to do more to explain reputation risk – more helpfully thought of as a consequence of operational risk – to better prepare the executive classes for the true impact of their decisions. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in some cases, hundreds of years of work could be at stake.