Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
The appointment of fashion re-tailer Sir Philip Green to be David Cameron’s adviser on public-sector waste looks even more improbable than Sir Richard Branson’s stint as Margaret Thatcher’s ‘litter tsar’. The BHS billionaire and the Virgin balloonist both operate through offshore private companies partly because they can, but mostly because their maverick business styles and uneasy relations with the media just don’t suit them to the public arena. But both (like Alan Sugar, Labour’s distinctly uncomfortable ‘enterprise tsar’) have an aura of celebrity that politicians hope will rub off: hence Cameron’s choice of Green rather than the less glamorous Simon Wolfson of Next, who would have been a safer, more cerebral choice and had certainly been hoping for the job. Green’s passage through Whitehall is bound to be stormy, and will probably be brief.
One illustration of Green’s combative modus operandi occurred in 2004 when he launched a hostile bid for Marks & Spencer, only to find himself thwarted by the appointment of Stuart Rose (who Green had tried to recruit for his bid team) as chief executive of M&S. Arriving at his office one day, Rose opened the car door to find Green steaming across the pavement towards him. According to his biographers, Green — who seemed to have been waiting nearby in his blacked-out Mercedes — started to drag Rose out of the car, shouting ‘I want a fucking word with you’, and during the 20-minute eyeball-to-eyeball that followed, rang his wife Tina in Monte Carlo and handed the phone to Rose so that Tina could join in the shouting. Afterwards, Green laughed dismissively: ‘If I’d been serious, he’d have gone through the window.’
How the Sir Humphreys will react to that sort of handling remains to be seen. And even if some of them deserve it, the more important question is whether Green’s seat-of-the-pants trading and merchandising skills can be usefully reapplied to cost control in public administration. Perhaps he’ll exercise a version of the ‘Kalashnikov test’ he jocularly devised for assessing Oxford Street competitors: ‘You could walk in with a machine gun, fire off a whole clip of ammunition and you wouldn’t hit a customer.’ Substitute ‘civil servant’ at the end of that sentence, and it could become the measure of his short, sharp impact on Whitehall departments.
The old Green Man
Robert Swannell, the Citigroup financier who masterminded Marks & Spencer’s defence against Green, has been named as Sir Stuart Rose’s successor in the M&S chair. Swannell is a safe pair of City hands of a type whose presence in any boardroom is as reassuring to shareholders as it is disappointing to journalists in search of colour. What’s more, reports suggest he will do the M&S job for a lot less pay than Rose, dousing any possible controversy on that front. Indeed, the only downside I can see to Swannell’s appointment is that it scotches my own chance of a non-executive directorship of the great retailer, since I must have made a very bad impression when we last met. It was long ago when he had just joined Schroders, where I was a very junior banker. He was on an induction tour to learn what we all did (in my case, very little) and came to see me immediately after lunch — which in my case had been a very liquid lunch in a dank old pub, now gone, called The Green Man. I can still see the clean-cut Swannell, who had trained both as an accountant and a barrister and was clearly going to go far, glinting at me as I tried to form a coherent sentence without falling off my chair. Was there, in that cameo, a glimpse of how our future career paths would diverge? I fear there was.
Hot potash
It’s hard to make potash sound exciting, but the $39 billion bid by mining giant BHP Billiton for the world’s largest producer of potassium-based fertiliser, PotashCorp of Canada — and the possibility of counter-bids from China and elsewhere — is the hottest deal this summer. Potash is just one of many natural resources that will be avidly pursued by corporate dealmakers as commodity prices rise and capital markets open up in the next phase of global recovery: the sector has already seen more than $300 billion worth of bids this year. That creates all sorts of opportunities to take a ride on companies that might be taken over, and my man with big binoculars in the oil and minerals sector has given me a beginner’s guide.
Take Africa, for example, with its vast mineral hoard that the Chinese are so keen to secure in order to feed and fuel their factories. London-listed companies to watch, my man tells me, include Kalahari Minerals, which has uranium, copper and gold interests in Namibia; Tower Resources and Chariot, oil and gas players also in Namibia; Aminex, which is exploring offshore Tanzania; and Cluff Gold, founded by former Spectator chairman Algy Cluff, which has mines throughout West Africa. The whiff of fertiliser in today’s takeover market is also the whiff of adventure ahead for intrepid investors.
Pack a granny
Pension gurus often warn us about the economic impact of increasing longevity. One aspect of that trend can be observed in this year’s must-have holiday accessory: no, not a copy of the Mandelson memoirs, but an octogenarian in every people carrier. Charles Moore’s recent account of his trip to Afghanistan with 82-year-old Sandy Gall is just one example; every family I met in France this month seemed to have brought along a grandparent, or even a brace of them. But this is not a rerun of National Lampoon’s Vacation, that 1983 Chevy Chase comedy in which dead Aunt Edna had to be lashed to the roof rack; today’s oldsters, with their bionic hips and multiple medications, are the life and soul. Unlike their offspring, they don’t drone on about iPads and apps and spend half the day answering office emails. They possess old-fashioned skills such as pre-satnav map-reading, they like a drink, and they have interesting life stories to tell, sometimes repeatedly. They may need help navigating the cultural landscape of the young — be careful, for example, that your dowager mother-in-law does not think ‘Lady Gaga’ is a reference to her — but on the whole they’re a holiday bonus. As the trend gathers momentum, I foresee a business opportunity hiring out talkative, party-loving old-timers through the small ads: ‘Charming gîte with pool and choice of former Spectator columnists.’
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