‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days
when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who nicknamed it the Dealmakers’ Arms, was often at the
captains’ tables.
‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days
when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who nicknamed it the Dealmakers’ Arms, was often at the
captains’ tables.
The City clientele drifted away after Gordon Ramsay took over in 2003 and abolished the jacket-and-tie rule; but perhaps they’ll drift back now that their old haunt has reopened along with
the rest of the great late-Victorian hotel after a three-year, £220-million facelift that was only meant to have taken 18 months and cost £120 million.
I’m not pandering to the PR people in the hope of a freebie (Oh go on then) when I say that the Savoy has always been more than just a hotel. Its ownership and finances represent
Britain’s longest-running corporate costume drama, a Downton Abbey that has notched up more episodes than Coronation Street and provided cameo roles for every big City actor since the second
world war. Thanks to an impregnable share structure devised by Cazenove, the founding D’Oyly Carte family and the hotel’s long-serving chairman Sir Hugh Wontner rebuffed a queue of
takeover predators, of whom the first, in the 1950s, was the property tycoon Harold Samuel and the last and most persistent was the Italian-born hotelier and caterer Lord Forte. ‘I’ve
known little Forte since he ran his milk bar,’ the ineffable Wontner liked to remark.
Forte ended up with a majority of the shares but not of the votes. After his empire fell to Granada, all the Savoy’s shareholders finally cashed in, selling their company (which also owned
Claridges, the Connaught and the Berkeley) in 1998 for £520 million to two US private equity firms, Blackstone and Colony — who in turn sold it for £750 million, six years later,
to a gang of debt-fuelled Irish punters led by former tax inspector Derek Quinlan.
The fate of Quinlan is a story for another day: he’s now based in Switzerland, trying to conjure up the £500 million or so he’s said to owe Irish and British banks. The symbolism
of a hotel on the Strand in the great money-Monopoly game of the last decade is all too obvious — and the next roll of the dice came from the Middle East in 2005, when Prince Alwaleed bin
Talal of Saudi Arabia bought the Savoy (without the other hotels) for around £230 million. But he didn’t buy it outright: his equity partner was Bank of Scotland, which also put up more
than half the purchase price as debt — a typical high-risk deal for the bank which, as the busted half of HBOS, later had to be swallowed by Lloyds and rescued by the taxpayer.
So that makes you and me big stakeholders in the refurbished hotel, with its £10,000- a-night Royal Suite. The least they can do is offer us a discount in the Grill, and call in Sir Philip
Green to check on portion control and use of the photocopier. Meanwhile Prince Alwaleed, whose fortune took a dent in the credit crunch, was rumoured in the summer to be looking to sell his Savoy
stake: who will star in the next episode, a mysterious Russian, or perhaps a Chinese?
Sugar’s the daddy
Alan Sugar’s autobiography, What You See Is What You Get, is as big as a breezeblock and, at first skim, about as entertaining. But it improves as you dip further into it, and frankly
I’d rather do that than watch his new series of The Apprentice, a programme about which I agreed with Digby Jones (then at the CBI) when he said: ‘I think it puts business in a very bad
light. Alan Sugar does everyone a great disservice by doing it. Young people will be turned off because they think they will be shouted at by a horrible fat old rich bloke.’
I’m still puzzled as to whether Sugar runs a business worth boasting about these days, since he sold his best-known brand Amstrad to BSkyB in 2007, and why he allowed himself to be saddled
with the title of ‘enterprise tsar’ when it was impossible to achieve anything with it in the bitter, dying months of the Brown government (the book says it was Shriti Vadera’s
idea). The in-your-face aggression of his television persona carries over into his prose — woe betide any ‘posh tosser’ who impeded his rise from the East End council estate of
his boyhood to his present eminence.
But his story of entrepreneurial self-motivation still stands as a model for any downhearted teenager: social mobility may have declined under successive governments that claimed to embrace it, but
if you really, really have the drive to break through, you can and you will. Lord Sugar would do more good if he stopped shouting at reality-show losers and just talked quietly about himself.
The search party
One evening I’m admiring a cameo appearance in a costume drama by one of our finest actors, the next morning I’m reading a letter from him about an item in this column. That’s the
joy of writing for The Spectator. My correspondent was provoked by my observation (7 August) that ‘relationship banking’ — meaning a long-term connection between bank and
customer, in which the former provides steady support so long as the latter behaves responsibly — had ‘disappeared without trace a generation ago’ and it was ‘time to send
out a search party’.
‘No need,’ says the great thespian: he has just the chap I’m looking for, name and address supplied. But rather than spotlight a solitary banker with a customer who still loves
him, let me invite other readers to send their own nominations (to martin@spectator.co.uk), whether of lending bankers who have stuck with you or your
business through thick and thin, or of wealth managers who provide a more valuable service than just stuffing your nest-egg into opaque savings products on which they earn fat internal commissions.
If sufficient names arrive, I’ll publish a little list; if they don’t, perhaps my original point still stands.
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