Eddie was a model public servant: that’s why Gordon was so rude to him
In Tokyo in the mid-Eighties, I bumped into a very senior Japanese investment banker who had just been to London to negotiate an operating licence. ‘We met…’ he paused for effect, bowing slightly at the neck and adopting what I can only describe as obsequious grimace, ‘…Eddie-George-san!’ All the other Japanese present nodded vigorously and sucked their teeth in accord. Lord George, who died last Saturday aged 70, was a big player on the world banking stage long before he became Governor of the Bank of England in 1993. He was also a model public servant: modest, calm, courteous, firm-principled, and a master of market technicalities. It was perhaps because he was so respected by everyone else that he was treated so brusquely by Gordon Brown, whose ‘tripartite’ regulatory structure — which removed the ‘banking supervision’ role from the Bank and handed it to the FSA — was imposed without consultation a few days after the 1997 election. Only George’s career-long loyalty to the Bank stopped him resigning in fury. Brown’s reform was presented at the time as a response to the Bank’s weak handling of BCCI and Barings; but with hindsight, we can see it as a characteristically paranoid manoeuvre to weaken the Governor’s power-base, lest it should threaten Brown’s own. And we have seen the long-term consequences, in the failures of regulatory oversight at Northern Rock, HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland.
My predecessor Christopher Fildes warmly recalls Eddie George’s last Mansion House dinner as Governor in June 2003 — alongside Brown, who was received with formal politeness despite his refusal to respect his hosts’ dress code. The Governor ended his gracious speech with a joke about making the transition from Who’s Who to ‘Who’s he?’ — and the assembled City rose to its feet and cheered him for a full five minutes.
To me, George was friendlier than I deserved, having written (on editor’s orders, but that’s no excuse) a savage piece about him in the Daily Telegraph during the early days of his governorship. We were last in contact a few months ago, when I hoped to interview him on the subject of bankers behaving badly. He rang from his splendid Cornish garden, no doubt with cigarette in hand: the answer was ‘Yes, but not yet’ — and I’m sad we shall never hear what he might have said.
Let’s all go to Wrexham
Hats off to Wrexham & Shropshire, the plucky little ‘open access’ train operator which has defeated an attempt to kill it off by Sir Richard Branson’s heavily subsidised Virgin Trains. With a staff of only 65, W&S has been running a modestly priced three-trains-a-day service from Wrexham General station to Marylebone since last year. But a proposed Virgin service from Euston, intended to poach W&S passengers, might well have put it out of business. Faced by a torrent of adverse publicity, Virgin backed down — its spokesman admitting it would be bad for the brand ‘to have blood on its hands’. W&S now faces a similar tussle with Arriva Trains Wales, which like Virgin can use its subsidy cushion to protect itself against tiresome upstart competition.
Let’s hope the Wrexham crew wins that one too, because it is quite some achievement to have overcome vested interests and grotesque Whitehall bureaucracy to win an open-access licence in the first place, and because W&S is part of a wave of smaller ventures that, if allowed to prosper, could finally turn privatised train travel into a passenger-friendly experience.
W&S is a collaboration between Renaissance — which promoted the open-access pioneer Hull Trains, and is now planning a Glasgow-to-Liverpool route — and Laing Rail, which has the Chiltern Railways franchise and is now owned by the hyper- efficient German state operator Deutsche Bahn. Together with Grand Central running from London to the north-east (a service I have praised here before), this growing gaggle of rail investors offers the hope that trains might one day take us where we want to go, at fares we can afford.
Consequences
Our business section has been elegantly slim in recent months, but I’m always glad to find evidence of its impact. Robert Beaumont’s City Life portrait of Nottingham caused quite a stir in December — and his complaint that the great Victorian shopkeeper and philan- thropist Jesse Boot is not even commemorated on his original chemists shop in the city centre has provoked action from the Boots company, which is about to celebrate its 160th birthday: ‘The Spectator drew our attention to the fact that there’s no plaque and made us think seriously about it. A plaque would be great,’ a spokeswoman told the BBC.
And back in November 2007, I offered some gratuitous advice in this column to Jonathan Aitken about his work on prison reform on behalf of the Centre for Social Justice: ‘If Mr Aitken is skilful enough to present his proposals in terms of value for taxpayers’ money as well as moral values, he may find a more sympathetic audience.’ He tells me I prompted him to do just that in Locked Up Potential, the report he published last month: if more enlightened ways of treating prisoners could achieve even a 10 per cent reduction in the shocking rates of reoffending, he concludes, there would be a saving of £1.2 billion a year. I hope his work becomes the basis of the Cameron government’s prison policy.
Finally there was David Wilbourne, the vicar of my Yorkshire home town of Helmsley, who wrote about Christ and the credit crunch in our Christmas issue and was promptly promoted to bishop — leaving me, as his novice churchwarden, in charge of the parish. I’ve written a lot about the unintended consequences of this economic crisis, but that was one I certainly didn’t see coming.
Recession-balls
My ‘recession-balls’ bouquet for Budget day goes to Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden, for her breezy contribution to the question of whether it’s wiser to try to spend our way through the recession, or to exercise the prudence that might have kept us out of it in the first place: ‘My mortgage rate’s keeping me in shoes. I know you’re supposed to be saving up for two years’ time when it’s going to be 12 per cent, but Christian Louboutin’s doing a massive trade out of me.’
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