Northern Rock's blonde knight?

Is it time for a reassessment of Sir Richard Branson? Chosen by the Treasury as the ‘preferred bidder’ for Northern Rock, he’s back where he craves to be and so often manages to put himself: in the headlines. And like every time he grabs the nation’s attention, two quite different caricatures of him have been projected.

On the one hand, there is the tirelessly creative, totally unconventional adventurer-entrepreneur whose brand image can sell anything and whose two-fingers-to-stuffy-old-corporate-capitalism has such powerful appeal to consumers even after many of them have had rotten experiences of his trains and his mobile phone service. The brand power of Virgin Money is clearly a major reason why its bid for the Rock is preferred over the JC Flowers consortium, which to City eyes looked at least as credible and as well backed, but whose promoters are relative unknowns in Britain.

But then there is the other Branson: the self-publicising, self-righteous maverick of whom so many deal-partners have tired over the years, who in his early days in the record business spent a (well documented) night in jail and paid a large fine for Customs & Excise offences, whom the City found impossible to handle in the years when Virgin was a public company. You can get the flavour of that in Jeff Randall’s column in the Daily Telegraph today. You can get more of the same flavour in Tom Bower’s excoriating biography of Branson, published in 2000, in which – besides a catalogue of character flaws – an analysis of all the available Virgin financial data suggested to the author that the debt-laden, over-stretched conglomerate was bound one day to implode.