Another tale of the Great Seducer and my tip for the woman to succeed him
When I was young I knew a man whose opening gambit with any pretty girl was, ‘Hello, shall we go straight to bed?’ He reckoned one in 20 said yes, so if he asked the question 20 times a day, he would never be lonely. All accounts of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief and would-be French presidential candidate who has been charged with sexually assaulting a New York hotel chambermaid, suggest a similar approach.
In the late 1990s — during the tenure of ‘DSK’ as France’s minister of finance and not long after his third marriage — an attractive female journalist of my acquaintance was sent to interview him at the French embassy in London. She left a card with her contact details, and as she left the building her mobile phone rang. It was DSK, suggesting they get together somewhere more private. She declined. He persisted. Finally he suggested she join him for dinner with Peter Mandelson and other New Labour insiders, an invitation that sounded sufficiently safe and interesting to accept. All went well apart from some whispering about ‘Dominique’s latest bit of fluff’ among the other guests; DSK kept his hands to himself but again pressed her to join him à deux afterwards. Again she declined, and after a few more emails he gave up the chase. ‘You hear similar stories about Bill Clinton,’ my friend tells me, ‘but those women always say how charmed they were. This guy was just… slimy.’
Cherchez la femme
Strauss-Kahn had been expected to step down shortly as managing director of the IMF to pursue his presidential bid, so there was already plenty of betting on who might succeed him. Here’s my multinational summary of the runners. Since Frenchmen have held this post for 35 of the past 48 years, amour propre dictates there must be a French favourite to beat: this time it’s finance minister Christine Lagarde, a former high-flying international lawyer whose CV includes a stint as an intern for a US congressman — so we can assume she knows how to deal with office sex-pests. Then there’s Polish central banker Marek Belka, who has the advantage of being European but not French or southern, and European Central Bank director Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, who has the disadvantage of being Italian — but shifting him to the IMF would make it easier for his countryman Mario Draghi to succeed Frenchman Jean-Claude Trichet as ECB president. Or possibly Draghi should go to Washington, leaving the ECB to be run by someone from a country that isn’t up to its neck in debt: Dutch central bank governor Nout Wellink, for example.
Still with me? The most exotic outsider in the IMF race is Kemal Dervis, a respected former Turkish economy minister and World Bank official. But since Angela Merkel of Germany has declared that the job must go to a candidate from Europe, Dervis’s appointment would force her to admit either that no one takes a blind bit of notice of her or that a Turk can count as a European.
Are there any British thoroughbreds snorting in the stalls? We’ve never provided an IMF chief — or a World Bank president, who have all been Americans — so surely it must be our turn? Gordon Brown fancied his chances, but David Cameron made it brutally clear he won’t support someone who ‘didn’t know we had a debt problem in the UK’. FSA chairman Adair Turner has the brains for the task, and the Bank of England might be glad to wave him off. Then there’s my old friend Shriti Vadera, Brown’s former enforcer and G20 emissary, who emerged from her customary media purdah to do several interviews about DSK this week. Born in Uganda, educated in India and Oxford, expert on Third World debt, tough as nails, scandal-free: she’s perfect. I’m off to put a tenner on her.
Swedish model
To Manchester Airport — to an anonymous block largely occupied by the UK Borders Agency, in fact — to track down a bank which is quietly establishing itself as a role model that puts the rest of the high street to shame. I’m in the north-of-England headquarters of Handelsbanken of Sweden, which has just opened its 100th British branch.
Never heard of it? That wouldn’t be surprising, since it wastes no money on glossy ‘profile’ advertising, instead relying on word-of-mouth recommendation. In a November 2010 EPSI survey of bank customer satisfaction, Handelsbanken topped the UK table with 83 per cent, compared to an industry average of 69 within which the worst major offender, Lloyds, scored a rock-bottom 58. And as well as being customer-friendly, Handelsbanken is regarded as exceptionally safe. It came through the 2008 crisis unscathed and was rated in a recent Bloomberg survey the world’s second strongest bank behind the Oversea-Chinese Bank of Singapore. The only British-domiciled bank in the top 20 was Standard Chartered, at 15th.
How is all this achieved? By the revolutionary principle of allowing branch managers to manage — with discretion to choose who to lend to and on what terms, with head office providing support and guidance rather than setting aggressive targets, and with no bonus prospects other than an egalitarian stake in a profit-share fund. UK chief executive Anders Bouvin has spoken of ‘a fundamental humanist view [that] if you put trust in people, people will respond in a positive way, take responsibility and deliver results’.
The branch managers I met over a suitably frugal buffet lunch had taken that message to heart. Most had escaped from banks which offered them no scope to build local businesses appropriate to local conditions. The sense of job satisfaction, and of relief at having escaped from discredited former employers, was palpable. I searched for a downside to the Handelsbanken model, which I happen to know is being watched with interest by senior regulators in London: the only disadvantage I could see is that it is too distinctive to replicate by acquisition, so reliant on organic growth — which means expanding one high street at a time rather than taking over a bundle of Lloyds branches. A name to watch nevertheless, and a ray of hope.
Comments