NO PIECE I have written here in 14 years has given me less pleasure than this. It is, of course, about the Anglers’ Conservation Association (ACA), the pollution-fighting body that is funded by the angling community and that in the past half-century has fought more than 2,000 legal battles, losing just three in the courts. The ACA has long symbolised the best in angling conservation. Now, it is in turmoil.

A month ago I reported that the ACA’s two most prominent officials, the husband-and-wife team of Jane and Bob James, respectively executive director and press and publicity officer, had left abruptly after unspecified “serious complaints” against them.

Since then, in a letter to all 14,000 individual members and 1,500 affiliated clubs, Dr Stephen Marsh-Smith, the chairman appointed last April, has launched a devastating attack on the way the organisation’s business, finances and staff were allegedly managed during the Jameses’ tenure. Jane James and her husband have responded furiously, denying all accusations and any wrongdoing. Chris Tarrant, host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, a keen angler, the ACA’s honorary president and a known close friend of the Jameses, has resigned in protest. So have some members of the management committee — as did, we now know, several previous members who were unhappy with the way the ACA, as they saw it, was being run. About the only thing the old and new regimes agree on is that reports of a £75,000 pay-off for the pair are exaggerated.

The effect of it all will be to dismay the grassroots supporters on whose contributions and enthusiasm the ACA relies. It places a heavy onus on Marsh-Smith and his aides to demonstrate that their actions have been justified and in the ACA’s long-term interests. In his letter to members, Marsh-Smith refers to four in-house solicitors “lost” in the past few years, one of them having to be “expensively paid off to head off a potential constructive dismissal case. It seems she refused to sign the Trustee Company’s accounts”.

The letter goes on: “In addition, throughout this period (1998-2004) it was often heard that progress was made in recruitment of members and securing income. However, a true analysis of the accounts shows otherwise. Against this, the wages, perks and other emoluments paid to senior non-legal staff continued steeply upwards . . . so that by 2003 more than one third of all the association’s total expenditure related solely to the cost of employing Mr and Mrs James. It should be remembered that these rises were against the background of financial losses, in some years severe.”

Jane James dismissed the allegations. “Every one of the committee members saw the audited accounts every year,” she said. “They were the same auditors who were used by previous directors and there was always praise for how the ACA was run.” Bob James said: “We did not decide our own salaries. All the salaries and perks were decided by the chairman at the time, and the treasurer. We are devastated by all of this.”

Quite how this series of claims and counter-claims will eventually be played out, no one can know. But there will scarcely be an angler in the land who does not feel that the survival, integrity and effectiveness of the ACA is paramount.

The whole sorry mess needs to be brought into the open, where supporters can see what has happened and form their own judgments. That is going to require more information than Marsh-Smith has so far made publicly available.

Supporters need to know not broadly but exactly what is alleged to have occurred since Jane James, then Jane Brett, took up her appointment on June 16, 1995 and Bob James was contracted to the payroll exactly two weeks later. Members need a clear picture of the events that, according to Marsh-Smith, turned a 1995 income of £292,699 and a surplus of £21,412 into a 2002 income of £267,483 and a deficit of £81,385 — this last position somewhat recovered in 2003 when income was £301,615 and the deficit totalled £38,715.

More details are needed on the cost of employing the Jameses, whose combined salaries, benefits and other expenses are said to have reached £102,000 last year. Exactly what the membership did and did not get for the £24,000-a-year plus expenses paid to Bob James for three days a week, needs to be autopsied. The loss of membership — down from 15,500 in 1995 to 14,019 in 2003 — needs to be fleshed out, as does the recruitment and loss of key staff.

All of this will not only give a clearer picture of events under the James regime but some idea of the way the ACA’s council and executive committee — and in particular its previous chairmen and treasurers — discharged their responsibilities. The final essentials are an exposition of how the ACA pursued its core business oftracking polluters over the period — and a clearly articulated plan showing how the new regime will address the present crisis.

It is not just the credibility of the old and new regimes that are on the line now, but the future of the ACA itself.

• Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month