My tip for enterprise tsar from Cameron’s list of loads-of-money peers: Lord Fellowes of Downton
Who, I wonder, will advise David Cameron on entrepreneurship now that Lord Young of Graffham has been fed to the sharks by the Downing Street crew for his unguarded remark that in this ‘so-called recession… most people have never had it so good’? Even some voices on the BBC were prepared to admit that the former Cabinet minister, corporate chief and venture capitalist wasn’t entirely wrong: technically speaking, Britain came out of recession a year ago, and although it was longer and deeper than previous downturns (thus ‘the worst in living memory’), low interest rates really did help make it feel less painful for many people than those of 1991, 1981 and 1974.
But Young’s words made bad headlines — and journalists covering the story took their cue from Cameron’s people, giving the 78-year-old peer a casual kicking as he departed. Instant ‘profiles’ of him were notably inaccurate: it’s a pity no one bothered to look up the essay he wrote in our Christmas issue of 2008 about what happened to him in the winter of 1973–74, when his property company collapsed amidst the chaos of miners’ strikes and the three-day week. ‘It was a miserable time but… I knew what I had to do. I was now technically insolvent… All that I had worked for since starting my first business 13 years before had gone. I had debts, mortgages, two children in school and no income… I simply had to earn a living.’ He did so in part by buying bundles of cheap air tickets to New York and turning a buck over there until conditions improved sufficiently for him to do so again over here.
Is there anyone else in Cameron’s circle who has that kind of life experience to draw upon? I doubt it, and last week’s loads-of-money list of new peers does not encourage me to think otherwise. Among the ‘business’ names, most are Tory party fundraisers or donors — or perhaps multimillionaire car dealer Robert Edmiston got there because the Prime Minister wants someone on the team who knows his way round Glass’s Guide. The only one with a wholly admirable story to tell is Sir Michael Bishop, who defied airline-industry odds for three decades at British Midland (now bmi) before selling to Lufthansa. And the only new peer who really would be a smart choice to replace Young as enterprise tsar is not on Cameron’s list at all, but on Ed Miliband’s: he is Jonathan Kestenbaum, who is about to stand down as chief executive of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, a body dedicated to the vital task of connecting British innovators to start-up capital.
History books
I had the pleasure of being a judge of this year’s Wadsworth Prize for the most outstanding contribution to the study of British business history. For my own books of the year, therefore, let me steer you away from shelves bending under so many weighty tomes about the recent (if you’re pessimistic or Irish, current) financial crisis, towards two accounts of past phases of economic change that we can look back on with pride rather than shame. The Wadsworth winner, Industrial Enlightenment by Peter M. Jones (Manchester University Press, £55), explains how late-18th-century ‘natural philosophers’ and entrepreneurs in Birmingham and other new industrial cities across Europe bounced ideas off each other to create a ferment of innovation as sparkling as anything in modern Silicon Valley.
Among the runners-up, The World’s First Railway System by Mark Casson (Oxford, £65) tells the story of the mid-19th-century ‘railway mania’ that created the network we have today — then re-tells it counterfactually to show that if it had been the product of scientific planning rather than capitalist competition we would have ended up with shorter, straighter lines and hubs in more sensible places. Mind you, only raw capitalism could have made it happen at all, and that will probably be true of the fast-rail link from London to Birmingham which is provoking so much middle-class nimbyism — the Midsomer Murders village is threatened, though you’d think they’d be more worried about all those corpses. I suspect the fast-rail route will become a lot slower, longer and less straight before it ever gets built.
My Downton discovery
Back to the lords and ladies, new and old. If you’re of the opinion that most financial pundits have been wrong for most of the past decade, you’re probably in a majority; so it is some consolation to our demoralised fraternity that we are at last to be represented on the red benches — by the fragrant Patience Wheatcroft, outgoing editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, who was also on the Tory list. All we want now is a baronetcy for Christopher Fildes and our spirits will be restored.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister could always turn for entrepreneurial advice to Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, whose surprise peerage looked like a device to distract the media away from the moneybags, but whose brilliant costume drama will bring a big boost to British export figures as it sells around the world. Fellowes’s ennoblement has provoked another flurry of speculation in my part of the world as to where precisely he pictured Lord Grantham’s seat: Yorkshire towns mentioned in the script are all close to Fellowes’s alma mater, Ampleforth, so the simple answer is that the author imagined Highclere, the house where the series was filmed, transported from Berkshire to the Ampleforth valley. A popular local theory, however, is that he was looking three miles further north to Duncombe Park, ancestral home of the Earls of Feversham, on the edge of Helmsley — where my own house was previously the home of the late Lord Feversham’s mother, who I gather was a great friend of Dame Maggie Smith. So I think that clinches it: I’ll be auditioning for a butler shortly, and opening my Downton Discovery Trail in the spring.
Enough Edwardian escapism already. ‘Government collapsing!’ says an email signed ‘A Friend in Need’. I’m off to Dublin to see for myself — I’ll report next week.
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