The sad news came yesterday that Sir Derek Higgs, one of the great masters of the British corporate governance regime, died suddenly at the age of just 64. A Price Waterhouse-qualified accountant with a long history in investment banking (or, as it was known when he started out in his career, merchant banking), he was chairman of Alliance and Leicester for the last two-and-a-half years.

But he is best known, of course, for the Higgs report - the Review of the role and effectiveness of non-executive directors. While criticised by some for allegedly trying to impose uniform boardroom structures across all companies, it was attacked by others as its recommendations were not mandatory. Rather, they fell into a "comply or explain" model that upset many who preferred their checklists and tick boxes to be nice and neat.

To give you an example of how Higgs himself seemed to permit exceptions to his 'rules', here's an item we first published just a few months after his report was released...

British Land was an easy target for the media when Derek Higgs published his report on the role of non-executive directors: Higgs sits on the board at the company where the chairman and chief executive are one and the same man, property colossus John Ritblat. So the recent announcement that the company is going to split the top job by the 2004 AGM earns top marks. Well, up to a point.

Section A.3.7 of Higgs’s proposed code of best practice says that, unless the company concerned is small, no individual should sit on all three principal board committees at the same time. But in British Land’s case, Lord Burns, David Michels and Dr Chris Gibson-Smith will all be serving on British Land’s audit, remuneration and nomination committees.

Chris Gibson-Smith? The new chairman of the London Stock Exchange? Indeed, the very same. Little wonder, perhaps, that, two days after his appointment was announced, the LSE issued a statement arguing that Higgs’s proposals should be translated into principles rather than hard-and-fast rules. -- From Extraordinary Items, Financial Director, May 2003

By the way, to give you an example of how Higgs didn't intend for his recommendations to be compulsory, we've spotted that the phrase "should not" was used 28 times and "must not" just once - and even then he was quoting Walter Bagehot.