Farewell to a charismatic old bruiser who never threw in the towel
George Walker, the former boxer, gangster’s minder and ‘leisure tycoon’ who died last week, was a persuader — both in the sense that he could be, as he once told me, ‘a bit rough with people’, and in the sense that if he decided to charm you, he was hard to resist. Fortunately, I fell into the second category. I got to know him during the period between his ousting as chief executive of Brent Walker, the conglomerate of pubs, betting shops, yacht marinas and other forms of amusement he built in the Eighties boom on a mountain of debt, and his trial on fraud charges in 1994.
He began by inviting me to tea at his daughter Sarah’s South Kensington mansion — she was the Marchioness of Milford Haven at the time, and had hung George’s portrait alongside her husband’s ancestors. He set about persuading me that his bankers, led by Standard Chartered, had been unreasonably brutal in the way they had pursued him into personal bankruptcy after Brent Walker’s finances went pear-shaped in the 1990 recession. I investigated this classic corporate drama and found several players in it who felt a grudging sympathy for the fallen tycoon. A former Brent Walker chairman, the eminently respectable banker Lord Kindersley, told me on the record that there had indeed been ‘a certain amount of vindictiveness’ in George’s direction.
We used that phrase as the headline on my Spectator article (26 June 1993) which concluded that George had been a fool to borrow so much — though at least when he ran out of luck he chose to stand and fight, unlike his fellow conglomerate builder turned fugitive Asil Nadir — but that the banks had been reckless lenders and had nothing to be proud of in their subsequent handling of the case. George was delighted with the piece, and would regularly ring up urging me to write more in the same vein. I never did, though I sat in for a day at his four-month trial — he was cleared of all charges — and later visited one of the nightclub-like Moscow betting shops, offering beamed-in Walthamstow dog races, with which he tried to rebuild his fortune.
My abiding memory is of George in the incongruous setting of that Kensington drawing room, up on his toes like the light-heavyweight champ he had once been, re-enacting crucial moments of the all-night Brent Walker board meeting at which he was finally sacked by six votes to five with three abstentions and, as dawn broke, escorted out of what he still thought of as his own building. ‘“Sign it, George, or else,” one of them said. “Or else what?” I said, “You gonna hit me? Yeah? Come on then, try it. You can have a couple of punches first, then I’ll take you. Come on!”’
When I was serving my apprenticeship here long ago, my predecessor Christopher Fildes warned me never to ‘let old rogues off too lightly’. George Walker was the sort of old rogue who might have been dreamed up by a scriptwriter. He must have been hell to deal with if you were on the wrong side of him, but he acted and spoke straight from the heart, and he never threw in the towel. You couldn’t help liking him.
London to Geneva
To Geneva, in spring sunshine, to address the convivial British-Swiss Chamber of Commerce. The hot topic is whether this gently paced lakeside city should continue to brace itself for an influx of refugees from the City of London — or whether all the talk about bashed bankers departing en masse was no more than pre-budget spin to deter new tax attacks on their collective profits and individual earnings. It is certainly the case that only a small number of financial businesses, mostly hedge funds, have actually packed their bags so far. A Policy Exchange report in December, Not with a Bang but a Whimper, found that only 2 per cent of firms in the sector were ‘currently planning or likely to go’, although roughly one in four have considered doing so or think it likely they will move some operational staff out of the UK in the next few years.
The truth is that it is a colossal upheaval to move an entire business and its key staff from one country to another, involving complex calculations about quality of life and infrastructure as well as tax and regulation. So the exodus is likely to remain a dribble for the time being. But that could change if what one London investment manager, quoted in the FT, calls ‘a Taleban faction of fundamentalists’ prevails in current debates about bank capital requirements.
Essentially, new international rules known as ‘Basel III’ set a baseline for ‘core Tier I capital’ (that is, equity or its closest equivalents) at 7 per cent of banks’ risk-weighted assets. But higher thresholds will be set by national regulators for ‘systemically important’ banks, and some voices at the Bank of England and the FSA are suggesting that the core capital level here should be as high as 15 to 20 per cent — which would seriously dent UK banks’ ability to achieve decent returns for investors, who might decide not to put up the capital in the first place. At that point, recent spin about the likes of HSBC and Barclays ‘plotting their exits’ might turn into reality, and the critical-mass attraction of London as the European time zone’s financial centre would start to crumble. The consequent shrinkage of the financial sector as a proportion of the UK economy would, according to the fundamentalists, be no bad thing.
It would also represent a huge opportunity for Geneva, if its citizens wanted to take it. Nowhere else on the continent can compete for international ambience. But the trouble is, there are fewer than 200,000 residents in the Swiss city (the same as York, though Geneva also has half a million commuters) and most of them have no wish to be swamped by expatriates and new office developments. To rival London as a financial centre, Geneva would need a Franco-Swiss version of Canary Wharf beside the airport, plus an international suburb the size of Milton Keynes. That won’t happen in a hurry, so London may hold on to its pre-eminence only because there’s nowhere else to go.
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