Certain events in a person's affairs draw attention by their very nature. The sale of a substantial enterprise. A transaction that requires disclosure. The taking of a public role. A moment when an interest must be declared. These are not misfortunes; they are often achievements, or the natural development of a successful life. But each brings a step-change in visibility, and the change is foreseeable long before it arrives.

The mistake commonly made is to treat the visibility as something to be handled when it happens. By the time such a moment arrives, however, the room to manoeuvre has largely closed. Attention is already being paid. The records are already being made. Whatever picture of the person was assembled is already the picture in use. Preparation undertaken at that point is no longer preparation; it is reaction.

Preparation undertaken in advance is a different thing. Before a public moment, while attention is still ordinary, there is time to understand what a heightened level of scrutiny would find. There is time to see the existing picture as it stands, to identify what is inaccurate or outdated or simply more exposed than it should be, and to address it calmly, without the pressure of an audience already watching.

The principle is that scrutiny does not create exposure so much as reveal it. A public moment does not, by itself, generate new facts about a person. It raises the number of people looking, and the intensity with which they look. What they find is, very largely, what was already there to be found. The work of preparation is the work of knowing, in advance, what that is.

This is why a foreseeable public moment should be treated as a deadline rather than an event. The useful question, asked early, is simple: if scrutiny rose sharply on a known future date, what would it find, and is that the picture one would want it to find. Asked early, the question can be answered and acted upon. Asked late, it can only be answered.

For a person who can see such a moment coming, and people of standing usually can, the foresight is to use the time that remains. The interval between now and the public moment is the resource. Spent well, it turns an increase in visibility into something met from a prepared position. Spent not at all, it leaves the same increase to be met as a surprise.