Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman of Lloyds Banking Group — making a similar observation in David Kynaston’s great history of the City: ‘I think his personality was such that he seemed to be quite tall but he wasn’t. Very elegant; very imposing. A God.’
Lord Richardson died last week, aged 94, and Bischoff must be one of the few bankers working today who knew him at the height of his powers. His leadership of the City during the 1973-74 banking crisis, and his marshalling (with his deputy Sir Jasper Hollom, still with us at 92) of high-street banks to fund the ‘lifeboat’ for endangered smaller lenders, was the Bank’s finest hour in modern times.
And although Richardson’s self-taught patrician manner (he came from a middle-class home in Nottingham where, like Ken Clarke, he was educated at the high school) could be intimidating, it certainly stiffened City sinews at a difficult time. My father, a lifeboat crewman on behalf of Barclays, secretly admired the Governor’s way of commanding meetings across a vast desk empty of papers, with a silent male secretary in a corner taking notes. And it must have been another Barclays man who — in the hearing of the sometime Treasury minister and Spectator columnist Jock Bruce-Gardyne — was brave enough to remark jocularly to Richardson that ‘Of course, the Bank hasn’t always been right’, citing Montagu Norman’s hostility in 1925 to the creation of Barclays’ overseas arm which, so Richardson’s interlocutor declared, had turned out a great success. ‘That,’ replied the Governor icily, ‘remains to be seen.’ But he was not always so icy. When I once described him as ‘austere’ to a grand dame who had recently sat next to him at dinner, she suffered what looked like a hot flush: ‘Oh no, he’s… he’s dazzling, utterly charming… the handsomest man in London.’
Financial storms have a way of overturning central-banking reputations. Just look at the fallen star of former US Fed chairman Alan Greenspan — also once widely believed to have divine powers — and the comeback of his predecessor, Paul Volcker, who after two decades in Greenspan’s shadow has popped up at Barack Obama’s shoulder as the architect of the bank-bashing reforms with which the President hopes to regain his lost popularity. But Richardson’s standing is untarnished by time; the City should commission a statue, perhaps in robes of the Roman senator he might have been in another life.
Rates of exchange
I’m fascinated by reinvention: of companies and brands, of national economies and — having transformed myself from a banker to all the things I call myself now — of personal lives. So it’s a joy to hear from Lucy Beresford, who was my cheerful colleague during a grim stage of my first career when I was called ‘chief operating officer’. Lucy has out-transformed even me: nowadays she’s a psychotherapist, a novelist, and the actress who reads out the nominated naughty bits at the annual Literary Review Bad Sex Awards party. She is also a traveller, and has recently returned from Zimbabwe, where, she tells me, ‘On New Year’s Day, all but one of the airside shops at Harare airport were inexplicably closed, depriving the national coffers of much needed foreign exchange and eager tourists like me of last-minute retail therapy. But an enterprising chap at Duty Free reached under the counter to offer me a crisp, blue 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar note. The much-mocked currency, which was “suspended” last year to be replaced in domestic commerce by US dollars and South African rand, is now marketed as a souvenir. In return I gave him a slightly shabbier greenback bearing the single digit five.’
At independence in 1980, five American dollars would have bought just three un-debased Zimbabwean ones, but so complete has been the havoc wrought by Mugabe and his central-bank governor Gideon Gono that Lucy may in fact have overpaid. On the US eBay site, these notes can be bought for 99 cents apiece. On the UK site, however, they can be sold for £1.99, so if Lucy cares to morph back into a banker, she can average down and profit from the arbitrage spread, offering a neat metaphor of the way our City successors dabble, through currency, commodity and debt markets, in the livelihoods of poorer nations. Zimbabwe is the poorest of all, and Lucy’s airport deal is a striking image of an economy so ruined that it seems, for now, beyond reinvention.
Going to the pictures
I’m glad to see that British cinemas have been thriving through the recession. It used often to be said that the national habit of going to the pictures would be killed by the availabi-lity of films on video, DVD and multiple television channels, and of alternative forms of cheap entertainment: the courtship ritual of a fumble in the back row has long been left behind by binge-fuelled promiscuity. So it’s remarkable that UK cinema attendances last year were, at 174 million, the second highest since 1971 (according to the Film Council) and takings a record £944 million. Our film-makers also had a good year, with a record level of inward investment, and UK independent films showing their best box-office returns for a decade. According to ‘minister for the creative industries’ Siôn Simon (another former Spectator writer) this trend is largely due to ‘strong and consistent investment’ by the Labour government — an echo of that abandoned ‘Cool Britannia’ theme of pre-war Blairism. It’s true there are a variety of tax credits and subsidies (through Film4 and BBC Films, for example) available to film-makers here, but I think the real driving force of the sector is the simple British love of collective cinematic escapism, which waxes rather than wanes at times of economic worry. It’s the point I made in October 2008, in the middle of the banking crisis and at the end of a week when we all feared our savings were about to be wiped out: I described the cheering experience of watching Mamma Mia! in a packed cinema, and called it a ‘mass inoculation of feel-good’. No form of home entertainment or substance abuse I know comes close to matching it.
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