Martin Vander Weyer
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Prime minister Dmitri Medvedev was reported to have called the bailout terms ‘theft’, but a fuller translation — apparently paraphrasing an old revolutionary slogan — was ‘stealing from the thieves’. You can see exactly what he means.
Speaking of Russian villains, I was tempted to shout ‘You look surprisingly cheerful’ when a smiling, loquacious, fit-looking Boris Berezhovsky strode past me in Berkeley Square the other day. The irrepressibly bumptious Russian car dealer turned oligarch in exile must be bouncing back — I thought — after the humiliation of his failed £3 billion claim against Roman Abramovich last year, followed by a battle with his ex-mistress Elena Gorbunova over the remains of his fortune. But that fleetingly upbeat impression does not accord with accounts of Berezhovksy as a man in a terminal state of depression and heart trouble before his apparent suicide aged 67, last weekend.
In the High Court, Mrs Justice Gloster labelled Berezhovsky an ‘inherently unreliable’ witness, so we’ll never know for sure how many assassination attempts he survived before the Grim Reaper finally called at his Ascot mansion. There was a real one — a Moscow car-bomb in 1994 — and he claimed at least three more after he moved to Britain, including one in which a Kremlin agent was sent to stab him with a poisoned fountain pen during a Bow Street magistrates’ hearing. That sounded far-fetched at the time, but less so after the subsequent polonium poisoning in London of his fellow Putin-baiter Alexander Litvinenko. Whatever the whole truth of Berezhovsky’s larger-than-life story, death by his own hand in the privacy of his own bathroom was surely a most unlikely denouement.
This column has long promoted the idea that women are more sensible than men, and that instability in banking and public finance would be less endemic if there were more female minds at the top — see last week’s item on who should run Cyprus, and one from last October on the need for ‘a cohort of no-nonsense mothers-of-three’ to run retail banks. So I think that frees me not to like Lean In by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg — a manifesto for ambitious women in the workplace which has attracted publicity out of all proportion to its weight, but very much in proportion to its author’s standing as one of the world’s most powerful media executives.
There’s nothing wrong with Sandberg’s thesis that women should believe in themselves, bag a seat at the table rather than at the back of the room, and make their partners share the childcare. I’m sure she’s right that in a corporate milieu where women hold only 7 per cent of executive directorships and 15 per cent of all boardroom places in FTSE 100 companies, the dice are still loaded, career-wise. She cites a 2011 -McKinsey report that found ‘men are promoted based on career potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments’ — but misses the point, made to me by an ex-City mother-of-several, that if your past accomplishments do put you in the frame for non-executive directorships, you can take your pick of plum part-time jobs, because public companies are so eager to tick the women-on-the-board box.
The real problem with Lean In is that the author can’t hide how pleased she is with her own career — her Facebook shareholding is worth $400 million, after all — but has distilled that experience into a preachy little assertiveness training manual for lesser mortals, designed to be a bestseller on Amazon and airport bookstalls. In doing so, I fear she provides evidence for one of the survey findings she attacks: that the more successful a woman becomes, the less she tends to be liked, whereas for men it’s often the opposite. Sandberg gives a more attractive account of herself, and says everything useful in the book far more succinctly, in a 15-minute ‘TED talk’. My own advice — if you’d like it, ladies — is to save your £16.99 and watch her on YouTube.
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