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By Bloomberg

The scandal engulfing HSBC Holdings Plc is another sign of how bank executives failed to realize the global financial crisis transformed them from winners to losers in the public’s eye.

That is the argument of Alastair Campbell, the communications chief for former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and author of a new book outlining lessons for excelling from politics, sport and business.

“If you want to win, you want to be the most competitive you can be,” Campbell said in a telephone interview. “Where it goes wrong is when there is no value system that underpins that.”

HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank by market value, is battling a scandal over the role a Swiss private banking unit played in helping clients evade taxes and in setting up accounts for drug cartels and arms dealers.

It comes after eight years of rolling crises for the City of London, the U.K.’s financial district, that included the bailing out of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Lloyds Banking Group Plc, the Libor-rigging at banks such as Barclays Plc and the manipulation of the currency market.

In his new book, titled “Winners And How They Succeed,” Campbell says former RBS Chief Executive Officer Fred Goodwin and one-time Barclays head Bob Diamond “felt like winners, and were treated like winners, for most of their lives. No more.”

“An obsessive mind-set that has to win at all costs can contain the seeds of its own destruction,” he writes in the book, published in the U.K. last week.

Different Era

Campbell faulted HSBC executives for seeking to cast the crisis as the product of a different era. “The practices that we’ve seen taking place at the Swiss private bank, which we absolutely do not support in any way, shape, or form, were in the period in the mid-2000’s,” HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver said in parliamentary testimony last week.

Campbell’s advice for bankers facing a crisis is to “get to the position you need to before anyone is pressuring you to do so” and also to highlight the importance of finance for economic growth.

“An overarching argument says, ‘We are part of the problem, but also part of the solution’,” he said. “Nobody ever comes out with a positive, pro-active plan to explain what we do is necessary for the recovery of the global economy.”

A former journalist, Campbell, 57, was Blair’s official spokesman and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. He said voters are still wary of the financial industry following the recession-sparking crisis of 2008.

“They feel that we the public paid the price for this and the masters of the universe haven’t,” he said. “People feel that banks haven’t learnt their lessons.”