Any other business

Lenin and Sid Waddell provide words to describe the leader of the Tube strike

Martin Vander Weyer

15 September 2007

Don’t mind me asking,’ a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, ‘but aren’t you Sid Waddell?’ I looked blank.

Congratulations to Tullow Oil, the exploration ‘minnow’ which was widely expected to join the FTSE-100 this week. Even if some last-minute hiccup denies it promotion to blue-chip status this time round, Tullow still offers a stirring tale of intrepid entrepreneurship. It began in 1985, when Irish accountant Aidan Heavey — who had no prior experience of the energy industry — named his fledgling company after a village near Dublin and ventured into the gasfields of Senegal. ‘Dallas was the biggest show on television at the time,’ he told the Times. ‘I guess I just wanted to be like Bobby Ewing.’ Tullow has gone on to explore oil and gas fields in Pakistan, various parts of darkest Africa and the North Sea — a spread of assets which has improved its attractiveness to investors. The announcement of a potential 1.3 billion-barrel discovery in Ghana has finally boosted Tullow’s market capitalisation into FTSE-100 territory, at more than £3.9 billion.

You could have bought Tullow shares early in 2004 for a pound each; now they’re worth £5.50. More pertinently, for £3 a pop you could have bought the Tullow shares sold by our television critic James Delingpole in May last year, when the price dived temporarily on bad news from Pakistan and Gabon, and you’d still be sitting on an 83 per cent profit. After listening to a passionate lament from James at a Spectator party about his rollercoaster Tullow ride — he was 127 per cent up before the dive — I persuaded him to write about the lessons learned: ‘When the time comes, get out quickly. If I’d sold on the first day of the fall, instead of going, “Oh my god. This isn’t happening” and selling on the third, I would have lost only 10 per cent of my shares’ value rather than 25 per cent.’ But of course hindsight says he’d have been better not to have sold at all. I asked James this week whether he had managed to climb back on the Tullow bandwagon. ‘My portfolio is shite,’ he replied succinctly, ‘because of course inevitably I sold my Tullow shares at the wrong price and only have about 50 quid’s worth.’ We’ll hear more about the rest of James’s portfolio shortly.

Righteous dame

‘Finance bores the pants off me,’ Dame Anita Roddick once declared. The founder of the Body Shop chain, who died this week, never hid her contempt for what she called the ‘pin-striped dinosaurs’ of the City, and the feeling was mutual. After Body Shop went public in 1984, bankers and brokers were constantly irritated by her campaigning for remote tribespeople and animal rights when they thought she should have been minding the shop. She took a final barrage of flak, not only from City cynics but also from animal rights groups, when she sold Body Shop to the L’Oréal cosmetics group for £652 million in March last year, collecting £130 million for herself — at that stage L’Oréal was still using ingredients tested on animals. But still we should pause to salute her as the creator, and marketer on a global scale, of pamper-yourself-and-feel-righteous ethical consumerism: other brands may be a lot hotter than Body Shop these days (I’m told Lush is the one to watch) but they are all Roddick’s imitators.