It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses.
It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses. Statistically, your chance of a gong this time was many times higher if you had designed an exciting range of lingerie (Michelle Mone, creator of the Ultimo cleavage-enhancing bra, picked up an OBE) than if you had come up with an exciting range of collateralised debt obligations. The only financier to trouble the scorers, also with a CBE, was one Dyfrig John, a little-known former executive of HSBC who is credited with modernising its branch network. An admirable contribution to national wellbeing, I don’t doubt, but if HSBC was, by implication, being singled out as the only high-street bank worthy of approbation, having avoided any suggestion that it needed a government bail-out, then why no knighthood for its chairman Stephen Green? He is, after all, a part-time priest who refused a bonus last year and has been described by the Guardian as ‘the epitome of the sensible banker demanded by Gordon Brown’. Indeed, given that treating bankers as pariahs seems to have no effect whatever on their belief that they need and deserve grotesquely large rewards, why not introduce the carrot of a title for City big-shots who are prepared to set a new example of self-restraint? ‘Sir Bob Diamond’ has a nice ring to it — though if the great Barclays trading chief is to be an honours contender he might have to renounce his US passport, reorganise his tax affairs, announce that he will henceforth accept not a penny more than the official minimum wage, and endow a couple of hospitals.
Betting coup
The strangest business story of the holiday period was the one about Paddy Power, the Irish bookmakers, offering odds of 4-1 on Monarch to be the next airline to go bust. The bookie claimed to have taken more than 100 bets to that effect and faced a £7,000 pay-out if the prediction came true — a sum which tells us that the bets were small change compared to the reputational cost to Monarch, whose managing director Tim Jeans was understandably outraged. Particularly intriguing was the full list of odds, offered on more than 30 airlines: hard to imagine even the most seasoned punter in a dark Dublin bar muttering ‘Oi fancy Air Berlin at 20-1 but the word from the baggage handlers is Malev’s unsound’, or some such. Shrewd observers have pointed the finger of mischief at our old friends Ryanair (quoted at 80-1), whose chief executive Michael O’Leary also happens to be a keen racehorse owner; Irish racing and business being small worlds, it’s unlikely that O’Leary does not have at least a nodding acquaintance with the lads at Paddy Power. But if Jeans wants revenge, a modest bet on Ryanair to fail would presumably bring its odds crashing in, while a short position in Ryanair shares would yield a profit on the brief downward blip that would result from the adverse publicity. No doubt Goldman Sachs — currently defending itself against accusations of short-selling the collateralised debt obligations it had created and placed with its own clients — could put this together in a neatly untraceable package. One thing’s for sure, however: no aspect of this story tells us anything about the real survival chances of recession-hit airlines.
Press the red button
The fire-alarm test and evacuation drill is a familiar ritual for all office workers — but have you ever pushed the emergency button in the lift to see whether it actually does anything useful? You might be tempted to do so after reading this cautionary tale. Just before Christmas, a financier friend of mine was looking for new office space in the West End. A pair of estate agents took him to see a small, elegant, empty building in St James’s, where the door of the small, elegant lift — a tight fit for the three of them — remained firmly closed when they reached the destination floor. A security mechanism then automatically bolted it so that it could not be forced open; unlike all lifts in action films, there was no hatch in the ceiling; and shouting was pointless, there being no one else in the building. The cramped compartment rapidly became very hot and airless. When my friend rang the emergency number on the lift panel, it was eventually answered by a woman in Birmingham who said the lift company had no engineers in central London; had he tried the fire brigade? They’ll charge you but they’ll get you out, she advised. He rang 999: no, said the call centre, we won’t send a fire engine for a stuck lift, however much you’re willing to pay, unless someone in it is seriously ill. We’ll all be seriously ill soon, my friend pointed out. Sorry, said the voice, you’re the lift company’s responsibility. So he pleaded again with the Brummie bird. She eventually rang back to say she had located a bloke with a spanner in Isleworth who would get there as soon as he could. After 90 minutes of vile incarceration, they were finally released. It could have been much worse, of course. The estate agents might have revealed that their underwear was packed with high explosives, or that they were the Miliband brothers in disguise. Even so, it’s a situation to avoid: why not start the new year by emailing your in-house health’n’safety officer and asking who you should sue if it happens to you.
Resolutions
I’m still working on my list of New Year resolutions, but here’s a couple I’ve jotted down so far, besides the obvious ones about losing weight and making a late run to get on David Cameron’s lavender list for the House of Lords. First, I intend to re- visit Tokyo — where I lived during the 1980s when futurologists were saying Japan would be the predominant economic power of the 21st century — to find out why it all went wrong. Second, I shall refuse any freelance journalistic commission that offers to pay less than it would have paid ten years ago, which is sadly par for the course these days. At least that second objective will release more time to fulfil the first one.
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