I was Shriti’s speechwriter once upon a time — but she won’t need me in Seoul
Several national newspapers lazily copied each other last week in describing me as ‘a former speechwriter to Shriti Vadera’ — the business minister who is leaving the government to become Gordon Brown’s emissary to the G20, and perhaps to prepare the way for his post-election role as director-general of a new economic world order of his own devising. As it happens, I am indeed her former speechwriter, but only in the rather limited sense that the late Bob Monkhouse is my former speechwriter: that is, I occasionally use one of Bob’s jokes, and my old friend Shriti once used one of mine. The difference is that Bob’s ancient gag always gets a laugh, but the long-forgotten one I inserted into Shriti’s speech (this was before she left the City to become Brown’s loyal confidante and enforcer) evoked nothing but painful silence, and to the best of my knowledge she never attempted to tell another one.
So Whitehall officials have me to blame for the brutally joke-free way she has treated them for the past decade. When it came to suggesting candidates for a post which involves commuting to Seoul to advise the South Korean president on his forthcoming role as G20 chairman, it’s not hard to imagine the response of Sir Humphrey: ‘Surely the ideal role for Baroness Vadera, Prime Minister, much though her, ahem, firm grasp of priorities would be missed by my colleagues…’
Happily for me, she probably won’t need a speechwriter in her behind-the-scenes role in the South Korean capital. Indeed, when she first arrives, she may find she doesn’t even need a desk. When I was a regular visitor 20 years ago, women in Korean government offices wore uniforms and were mostly employed to operate the lifts. Local attitudes to racial equality were also, how shall I put it, distinctly old-fashioned. I’m sure things have moved on since those days, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall the first time one of President Lee Myung-bak’s henchmen suggests Shriti serves the tea.
The exodus begins
The news that Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, is shifting its chief executive’s office to Hong Kong is truly a sign of the times. The Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, as it proudly used to be, brought its head office to London in 1992 as part of the terms of its takeover of Midland Bank, and to reposition itself for the coming Chinese take- over of Hong Kong. But the group still has a massive and well-spread business throughout Asia, and Asia is where the best of the action is going to be in the next few years as the global economy gradually pulls out of recession. Analysts at UBS have recently forecast growth for Asia excluding Japan in 2010 of 6.6 per cent; industrial output is already back to pre-crisis levels in some parts of the region, and as my colleague Bill Jamieson says in this month’s issue of Spectator Business (available from 0800 031 9715), there’s a distinct absence of earnest hand-wringing about whether green shoots are in sight or not: ‘The strength of South East Asia’s rebound has stunned Western economists.’
Commentators have also pointed out that HSBC chief executive, Michael Geoghegan, who will be moving eastwards in February, will be taking his £3 million-a-year salary-and-bonus package out of a 50 per cent top-rate-of-tax zone and into a 17 per cent one. Like the recent cunning move by Barclays to take 35 highly paid executives off its books by funding them to ‘buy out’ $12 billion of its less attractive assets and relocate with them to the Cayman Islands, that too is a sign of the times. With Gordon Brown’s conference-pleasing promise to outlaw excessive bonuses, all this may mark the start of a trend that will grant Lord Turner of the FSA his wish to see London’s banking community diminished in scale, wealth and appetite for risk. But it won’t help an incoming chancellor (see Christopher Fildes on page 31) who hopes the need for savage spending cuts will be mitigated by a rising tide of tax revenue from the financial sector as markets recover.
My fragrant vision
I always thought a ‘hammam treatment’ was what happened to that American youth in a Turkish prison in a film called Midnight Express. But I experienced one in the spa of a West End hotel the other day, and came out feeling thoroughly enlivened. The fizz with which I went through the rest of the day had less to do with the application to my skin of a combination of fragrant oils and what felt like an industrial pan-scrubber, and more to do with the information that the basement treatment room had previously been the vault of the London branch of the Bank of Nigeria. I had been lying on a stone slab where there once might have been a stack of gold bars labelled ‘Personal property of President Sani Abacha’.
It’s good to think that much of the late dictator’s loot has been recovered; more philosophically, it’s good to discover examples of how buildings find new uses as economies are transformed. The rest of the hotel, the Sofitel St James in Waterloo Place, used to be Lloyds Bank’s Cox and Kings branch, descendant of the 18th-century agency that administered the payroll of British regiments at home and abroad. In more recent times, it was no doubt busy shovelling money to West End property developers and hedge funds. As the fall-out from the financial crisis continues, and as the HSBC-led exodus gathers momentum, many other former banks will find more ‘socially useful’ purposes — though I’m not sure what Lord Turner’s position is on hammam treatments.
Allowing this train of thought to roam free — as one does on the massage table — I imagined how invigorating it will be if Chancellor Osborne’s application of an industrial scrubber to departmental budgets causes great swaths of the public estate to find new life in the private sector. The picture that came to me, I know not why, was of Quarry House in Leeds, the vast, fortress-like headquarters of the Benefits Agency. I imagined it emptied of civil- service jobsworths and refilled with bioscientists, software designers, web entrepreneurs, green-tech exporters, venture capitalists, chocolatiers, video artists and tapas bars. And in the vault where they used to keep the abandoned plans for welfare reform, a fragrant, steamy, vision-inducing spa.
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