Martin Vander Weyer
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There’s more than a touch of Tony Blair about Branson in all this: the perpetual youth, the messianic gleam, the access to presidents. But our stilted chat also reminds me of the elderly Yehudi Menuhin, who held forth between catnaps about the intelligence of insect communities in the African desert. Branson still has his appetite for hard deals and dangerous fun (kite-surfing with a naked blonde on his back, say), but in other ways he has clearly moved on in search of something more meaningful.
He has seen off most of his business detractors, but it irks him that the British media responds so cynically ‘when you’re a celebrity trying to do something positive’. On this occasion, then, and not just because I enjoyed the party, let me not slip into that habitual mode. I’d certainly rather be on a desert island with Branson than Blair — and since he already owns one in the Caribbean, I’m sure he’d be a handy companion. Perhaps he’ll teach me to kite-surf, as well as to understand the rhythm of the oceans.
One reason the British establishment has never liked Branson is his irritating, in-your-face informality, not so much a conscious protest against convention as a deafness to social nuance. At a party hosted by our acting high commissioner, everyone obeys the ‘lounge suit’ rubric except the tie-less star guest in jeans, who makes a stumbling speech in which he thanks ‘the ambassador’. On the tarmac at Mumbai, his encounter with an official welcome party looks excruciatingly awkward, because he won’t shake hands — not wishing to pass on his cold, he says — and doesn’t seem to want the proffered bouquet.
But everyone, high and low, wants to touch his sleeve. And his megawatt grin and entourage of Virgin beauties make him a media magnet. On the Mumbai seafront a comic cavalcade assembles: the great man, in Indian bridegroom robes, clambers on the roof of a battered taxi to be escorted by Bollywood dancers and flag-waving flight crew towards a mass of cameras. As he passes me at the front of the crowd, he shrugs and says sheepishly, ‘The things we do…’ It’s the most human moment of our encounter.
The pictures, lit up by Virgin red and Indian gold, are fantastic. They’re all over the local media, and it’s mission accomplished. Only one negative: Britishness is represented by Indian male models in ill-fitting guardsmen’s uniforms topped by limp bearskins worn at the wrong angle. There’s my Spectator strapline, I whisper to a nervous Virgin press officer: ‘Branson insults historic regiments.’
‘In business, how do you balance flamboyance with credibility?’ asks a feisty Indian journalist. The answer from Branson is that of course the product itself has to be sustainable, but that when he started his airline in 1984 the low-cost aviation pioneer Freddie Laker advised him to use his penchant for stunts as image-making material. It was cheaper than conventional marketing — and 28 years later, brand and personality remain inseparable even though Branson has long since given up a hands-on role in managing the airline, which is 49 per cent owned by Singapore Airlines.
But the question was really designed not so much to elicit the well-worn Laker anecdote as to provoke comment about Vijay Mallya, the drinks tycoon and self-styled ‘Branson of India’ whose Kingfisher airline has just been grounded, its staff having been left unpaid for months — while Mallya himself was seen partying at the Delhi grand prix, and his superyacht and luxury penthouse remain Mumbai landmarks. Branson offers no criticism, merely observing that ‘the airline business isn’t easy’ and that every US carrier that has ever competed against Virgin over the Atlantic has gone bust, in some cases several times over. But the subtext is that what’s most difficult is to be a successful Branson imitator. Love him or hate him — after this encounter, I can’t help feeling a bit of both — he’s truly a one-off.
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