Martin Vander Weyer
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The one thing I believe would assuage the hostility behind that argument is a return to domestic lending as usual. Barclays says that ‘gross new lending to UK households and businesses last year totalled some £35 billion’, against a pledge of only £11 billion, but anecdotal evidence suggests — and this is a perpetual peril of banking, in good times as well as bad — that managers down the line haven’t been reading head office’s instructions. I hear too many tales of longstanding small-business customers being whacked with punitive extra charges or suddenly told their credit lines have been slashed. Until that issue is addressed, the British public will continue to regard bankers as no better than high-street muggers.
Native genius
A memorable moment in my stint as a Daily Telegraph leader writer came on 15 July 1997 when the editorial conference was interrupted by the news that Gianni Versace had been shot dead on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion. The paper’s fashion desk, in deep shock, felt this was a hold-the-front-page moment. But you may imagine the assembled sages — Charles Moore in the chair, Bill Deedes on the sofa — struggling to adopt grave expressions while clearly wondering why the fate of a high-camp Italian fashion designer had been allowed to disturb our mellow discussions on the latest anti-foxhunting bill and Tory splits over Europe. These days, however, the news media are the realm of new men, in every sense, and the apparent suicide of Alexander McQueen, ‘bad boy of British fashion’, was front-page everywhere, print and broadcast.
I thought at first that this was just one more mass outbreak of post-Diana celebrity-death syndrome. But the more I heard, the more I was impressed by ‘Lee’ McQueen’s rise: the sixth child of an east London taxi driver, he learned his craft as a Savile Row tailor’s apprentice before making a splash at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design and emerging as an edgy new star of the couture world. Say what you like about politicians’ attempts to puff British ‘creativity’, but fashion design is one of several sectors — film-making, about which I wrote recently, is another — in which we really do have a reservoir of world-class skills, and no barriers to talent. I wouldn’t know a McQueen creation from a Marks & Spencer dressing-gown, but that doesn’t mean I can’t applaud what he stood for.
Risk and reward
I was intending to write about VAT this week, but instead let me stretch the boundaries of Any Other Business to pay tribute to two other recently departed ambassadors of our native genius. The Hull-born actor Ian Carmichael was a North Yorkshire neighbour — across the moors, that is — and a supportive patron of the project, which I led, to create an arts centre in Helmsley. Lunches at his home in the Esk valley were long afternoons of fine wine, theatrical gossip and worldly, well-informed conversation that belied the silly-ass image he so elegantly perfected on screen: curiously, the first question he ever asked me was ‘What d’you think of that Lonrho chap, Tiny Rowland?’
It’s many years since I was in touch with the author Dick Francis, but he was one of the first people to encourage my own ambition to be a writer, after we spent a holiday together on a yacht in the Mediterranean — he and his wife Mary as guests of honour, me as deckhand. I can scotch the rumour that it was Mary who really wrote his thrillers, though she certainly did much of the research; what struck me most about Dick was his down-to-earth attitude to his work. He produced a cracking bestseller every year in those days, on a contract under which, so long as he delivered a new manuscript in time for the pre-Christmas hardback market, all his previous titles stayed in print. It was a tough slog, and he was always worried (as Ian Carmichael was too, and as creative people so often are) about staying ahead of the taxman. The yacht, incidentally, was the one he used as a setting in Risk, though I can also scotch the rumour that I was the model for its intrepid, lady-pleasing hero.
Confessional
Beyond Business, the ‘inspirational memoir’ (as its cover declares) by John Browne, has attracted sympathy for its frankly self-critical account of the former BP chief’s fall from grace after he gave a false account of a gay relationship that was about to be exposed. But how does the book stand up as the leadership manual it also claims to be? Much better, I would say, than more boastful examples of the genre, such as those tedious efforts by former GE boss Jack Welch. The trouble is that wisdom on this subject is all too often a statement of the bleeding obvious and what is remarkable is how often the obvious is ignored. But here is a Browne nostrum that might usefully be taken to heart by his near-namesake, the Prime Minister: ‘Leaders are not perfect; they are bound to make mistakes as they do new things. But they must never make the same mistake twice.’ Like, say, putting short-term political gain ahead of national economic interest, as Gordon did year after year in his own budgets and as Westminster gossip says he is pushing Alistair Darling to do next month. Now that Piers Morgan has put him in confessional mood, can we look forward to a frank post-election essay in self-criticism entitled Beyond Brown?
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