Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you
If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since October, when I told an audience at the Ilkley Literary Festival that I would rather let banks reform themselves than see them subjected to punitive taxes and fierce new regulation — only to be set upon by two elderly ladies telling me I was part of the smug conspiracy that was the root of the problem. So let me be plain. The ‘one-off supertax’ on bankers’ bonuses panders to ugly sentiment, sets a rotten precedent, and will yield a fraction of the half-billion claimed by the Chancellor in his Pre-Budget Report. But come on, chaps, what did you expect? Masters of slick presentation that you are, how well do you feel you’ve made the case for your own defence? The fact is that you have been paid, collectively, far too much; that reasonable people believe prospects of excessive reward warped your collective risk judgment; and that there is such a thing as a national sense of fairness, and you continue to offend against it. So my Christmas message to the City is: stop whingeing, read Budge Firth’s sermon on page 55, and if you’ve already found six ways to avoid writing a bonus-tax cheque to the Chancellor, write a bigger one to your chosen charity instead. Then you might no longer need me to speak up for you.
Are you there, Bruce?
As a professional obituarist, I observe that 2009 has been a mercifully lean year for the business world. We said farewell to hard-partying Ernie Harrison of Racal, aged 82, in February, and chain-smoking Eddie George of the Bank of England, aged 70, in April. But perhaps the most potent name to be inscribed in the great book was that of Bruce Wasserstein, the Wall Street dealmaker who died in October, aged only 61. ‘Bid-’em-up’ Bruce, latterly chairman of Lazard Frères, had a hand in more than 1,000 takeovers during a 35-year career, all of them highly remunerative to himself and fellow investment bankers, rather fewer of them generating decent returns for shareholders of the companies involved. Famously, he brokered the dotcom marriage of Time Warner and AOL which came to be regarded as one of the worst deals of all time, then tried to make another bundle out of breaking it up again. Asked why he maintained such a relentlessly aggressive pace when he had already made himself a couple of billion, he answered: ‘Frankly, I never considered the alternative.’
So it must irk him, from the place he now occupies — I’m picturing somewhere rather like a crowded Dubai nightclub with locked doors, no air-conditioning and no BlackBerry signal — that there are so many fat fees he can no longer collect. Deconstructing financial giants and reassembling them in different shapes will generate billions for the next generation of Bid-’em-ups, and meanwhile Kraft-versus-Cadbury (in which he was an early adviser to Kraft boss Irene Rosenfeld) rumbles on and on. This has the feel of a bid battle from a distant era — like switching on the telly to find yourself watching Noel Edmonds’s Deal or No Deal –— and in the absence of Wasserstein, today’s financiers must find themselves having to phone long-retired former colleagues for tactical advice. Now that Nestlé and Hershey may be teaming up to outbid Kraft, the entire global confectionery-to-convenience-foods industry seems to be engaged, and any chocolate- related news item, even the Fairtrade KitKat, takes on sinister new meaning. As for the announcement — on the Daily Telegraph obituaries page, of all places — of a recall of Kellogg’s Choctastic Pop Tarts, what’s the secret signal in that? A spoiler bid by Cadbury for the great American cornflake maker? Set up the Ouija board and call for Bruce.
Toxic hazards
At this season there is lively competition among columnists to mention the most esoteric books they claim to have read during the year. Often this takes the form of: ‘Much enjoyed dear old X’s biography of Y, though he curiously omits to mention the occasion when the three of us dined a little too well with Z, who was of course sleeping with both X’s wife and Y’s valet at the time.’ My top choice — it has only just arrived, so I shall be dipping into it over Christmas — isn’t quite in that category but has just won the prestigious Wadsworth prize. It is Defending the Indefensible, by Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, and if you’re guessing that it must be an apologia for bankers, you’re wrong: the subtitle is The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival. Its authors, I see, have written widely on ‘the history of industrial hazards’ — so perhaps they should turn their attention to toxic finance next. The Wadsworth, awarded by the Business Archives Council for the year’s most outstanding contribution to the study of British business history, may not yet be as celebrated as the Booker or the Whitbread, but it richly deserves to be — because if business leaders, bankers included, were better informed about their own histories, there might be fewer hazards all round.
Your own, your very own…
I’m on stage this week, as Master of Ceremonies of the Christmas Olde Time Music Hall in Helmsley, my home town in North Yorkshire. This requires, of course, a re-creation of the elaborate, alliterative verbosity of the late Leonard Sachs, who would have been 100 this year and whose weekly show from Leeds City Varieties, The Good Old Days, disappeared from our television screens in 1983 — though his persona remains engrained on the collective memory, at least in these parts. The role also requires lively repartee with the audience. I’ve tried a variant of what I believe is an old Ralph Richardson gag: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, is there a doctor in the house? Ah, thank you, doctor: tell me, what’s your prescription for this show? Should we put it out of its misery, or give it another massive injection of laughing gas?’ But I got a bigger cheer for introducing an extra item with: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, is there a banker in the house? Ah, thank you, sir: have we got a bonus for you — and they can’t tax you for it!’ Believe me, it’s all in the comic delivery.
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