Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
The downside of globalisation is contagion. That was the lesson of the Icelandic ash that damaged the livelihoods of Kenyan rose-growers, and it’s the lesson of this week’s Greek bailout. The deal that will see Greece’s euro partners stump up E80 billion, plus E30 billion from the IMF, touches millions of people who have never given a thought to the parlous state of Greek public finances. Crude oil blipped up on ‘buoyant sentiment’ while the Mexican peso looked perky, reflecting a view that riskier assets might be back in fashion. US Treasuries dipped as institutional investors felt less need for the refuge of US government paper — but gold perversely strengthened, habitual doomsters in that market still seeing the need for a safe haven against the threat of a wider sovereign-debt crisis. And hard-pressed Irish taxpayers, who have lately set an admirable example of fiscal discipline, found themselves lending E1.3 billion to Greeks who would rather riot in the streets than accept reasonable austerity measures.
Yet none of these reactions would have happened if Greece had not been allowed to cheat its way into the euro and pile up debt on the strength of membership — and the urgency of the bailout has been far more about fear of contagion across southern Europe than about solidarity with a delinquent partner. Even if profligacy and corruption had still led Greece to ruin, outside the euro, the ensuing default and drachma collapse would have been localised and relatively easy for monetary experts to address using methods learned in Latin America in the 1980s. As it is, like the oil-slick in the Mexican gulf, the sovereign-debt threat is still out there and spreading: no one knows whether the containment will work, or where the poison will come ashore.
Blaming BP
Speaking of which, BP already seems to have been found guilty, both by the American government and by most of the British media, in the matter of the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, on which 11 workers died. President Obama’s interior secretary, Ken Salazar, has said he intends to ‘keep the boot on the neck’ of BP, which leased the rig and accepts responsibility for the clean-up, but blames the alleged failure of ‘blowout preventer’ equipment on the rig’s owner, a Swiss-based firm called Transocean. The disaster will cost BP billions of dollars, but I hope it does not cost BP chief executive Tony Hayward his job. When he was chosen to follow the fallen Lord Browne, Hayward’s brief was to overhaul BP’s safety procedures on the basis of lessons learned from the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion, which caused 15 deaths. The Texas City commission led by former US secretary of state James Baker was ‘quite rightly scathing’, Hayward told me, but it gave him a ‘road map’ for the task ahead. He told me also that his own obsession with operational safety was prompted by the searing experience, as a young manager, of being confronted by the distraught mother of a worker killed in an accident at a plant in Venezuela for which Hayward was responsible.
Five years after Texas City, Deepwater Horizon is a terrible setback — and, as with the Baker report, official US responses carry more than a hint of hostility towards a British company that has competed so effectively against American ‘big oil’. Many people in this story deserve more sympathy than Hayward — who, his detractors point out, earns £4 million a year for his pains — but we can at least respect his purposeful response in mobilising the massive containment effort, making plain that BP won’t duck its obligations, and quoting Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ It’s tough at the top.
Umpires’ inspection
The County Championship game between Yorkshire and Durham at Headingley last week ended in a predictable draw after the home side knocked up a huge first-innings total. I’m picturing a traditional scene of shivering fielders watched by elderly members chuntering over cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and copies of the Yorkshire Post. But cricket is a changing sport, and the northern press is intrigued by the involvement in the Durham club — reigning county champions — of Indian ‘media mogul’ Gautam Radia, who has injected £2.4 million to help develop Durham’s ground, which will be an Ashes test venue in 2013.
These days, any story connecting cash, cricket, media interests and India is assumed to point only in one direction: towards the tawdry ‘Twenty20’ razzmatazz of the Indian Premier League. The club says there’s no secret behind Radia’s presence: he’s a long-time associate of Durham chairman Clive Leach and his investment pre-dates the IPL. But Durham has also been talking to one of the IPL teams, Chennai Super Kings, just as Hampshire has struck a deal with another, Rajasthan Royals. And the whole IPL circus is under investigation for alleged fraud, money laundering and illegal betting, its self-styled ‘commissioner’, Lalit Modi, having been suspended immediately after the latest IPL series final.
English cricket embarrassed itself once in recent memory by embracing ‘Sir’ Allen Stanford, the Texan who landed his helicopter at Lord’s carrying $20 million of prize money for a ‘Twenty20’ series between England and his Antigua-based team. But the proposition fell apart when Stanford was arrested on fraud charges following the collapse of his banking empire. Our county clubs and players would be wise to wait for an umpires’ inspection of IPL before they rush onto that particular pitch: it may look glittering and lucrative, but they are a lot safer playing four-day draws to half-empty stands under leaden English skies.
Heir-brushed
Tony Blair’s reappearance during the election prompted two questions. First, why did he bother? Second, given that no one I know has ever paid to hear him lecture or receive his advice, how does he really earn his millions during his long absences from the public eye? The answer to both may lie in a third question: ‘Who’s the daddy?’ He reappeared not to win floating votes, as the spin suggested, but to remind Labour people that he’s still a force in their party’s destiny. And he makes a living, I can exclusively reveal, as the model for the father figure in those rather striking father-and-son Swiss watch adverts. Take a look: it’s certainly an explanation for that fake tan. ‘You never actually own the Labour party,’ is the message in his eyes. ‘You merely look after it for the next generation.’ And who’s the boyish heir beside him? We’ll find out soon enough.
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