\ew warning to mariners: pay salvage or I'll make sure your ship sinks
Captains whose ships were in trouble would always be wary of letting a self-proclaimed rescuer clamber aboard and claim salvage. How much worse if the rescuer threatened that, unless his claim was accepted, he would do all he could to make sure the ship sank. Rough weather would then be the least of a mariner's perils. This was the recent experience of a company which had drifted off course, had been holed and was taking in water. It needed help in a hurry — help to meet its obligations, help to bring its shareholders and creditors together, help to navigate the shoals of the law, help to stay afloat. A number of would-be helpers came alongside, offering to take things in hand for a suitable fee. One of them was an international bank which, by way of putting its case, made clear that if it was not chosen, it would lose no chance to hamper the rescue and bring the company down. It was not chosen and, true to its word, it was seen to hamper the rescue — happily, without success. Not long ago, this bank would have been called to order. At the Bank of England, ice would have formed in Governor Richardson's pale blue eyes as he coldly made clear that such wrecking tactics were out of place in the City. For his successor, that would now be harder. His power to discipline banks was a casualty of Gordon Brown's reforms and, in any case, some international banks are now big and ugly enough to use their full weight and play to the laws' limits. The City is the worse for it and so, too, are its clients. Think hard before such rescuers throw you a line.
Wed and repent
The Inland Revenue's team scored a fine win this week on University Challenge. A team from the Customs and Excise, if it had got as far as the studio, would have kicked the door down and confiscated the trophy. Deep is the gulf that divides the wranglers of Somerset House from the excisemen who chase after rum-runners, but what history has set asunder, Gordon Brown would join together. When you reorganise, you bleed: this merger of opposites looks doomed to me, but he hopes it will make for efficiency, and thus help the taxmen to pay his tax credits on time, or at least pick up the telephone when hapless inquirers come through on the helpline. His ministers have been getting complaints, and no wonder. He himself is to blame for importing complexity into a tax system that did not need it. No wonder the taxmen, like the taxpayers and the tax accountants, cannot cope.
In the family
Reports of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild's retirement have so often been exaggerated that I wonder, even now. At the bank that his great-great-grandfather founded, he is handing over the day-to-day management to his French cousin. Baron David, but is staying on as chairman. This comes with a Rothschild reunion which is meant to make N.M. Rothschild and Sons what it was until a century ago: one of a group of Rothschild 'houses' run by a family partnership. As part of the deal, the French Rothschilds will write the sort of cheque that makes a difference, even to a Rothschild. For 21 years, Sir Evelyn has sustained his own house and seen off all its rivals. Old man Nathan Mayer Rothschild would be proud of him.
Monitor on rails
When it comes to making life more difficult and more expensive, we can count on the Health and Safety Monitor. Like the Compensation Fairy, she has no money of her own, but that does not stop her spending other people's. She is never happier than when declaring cheese unhygienic or keeping children off swings, and on the West Coast Main Line (so my railway correspondent, I.K. Gricer, tells me) she is in her element. This is the project whose overrunning costs torpedoed Railtrack and now bedevil its successor, Network Rail. No doubt Railtrack's initial estimate was sketchy, representing, as builders' estimates do, a sum of money half as much as it
would turn out to cost, even before the Monitor weighed in. John Armitt, who runs Network Rail, has described her at work on replacing a crossover. It is not good enough, so she says, for the chaps to park their cars in a field near the line. There has to be a Portakabin city, with a cafeteria and. of course, lavatories, and a proper carpark with a tarmac surface, and a new road leading to a floodlit worksite. Such money as is left over can then be spent on the railway. The safest and healthiest railway would be one on which no trains were running, and this may be her aspiration.
Emergency exit
New from the Health and Safety Monitor is a rule which provides me with protection when I have to sit through conferences. Before the first speaker gets up, the chairman — just in case the place catches fire — has to point the exits out to me and tell me how to leave the building. Waking, an hour later, from a light doze, I conclude that this is one of her better ideas.
Baldilocks
My late lamented colleague, Auberon Waugh, would refer to Harold Creighton as Baldilocks. Bron's own pate, in those days, had a thick russet thatch — he should have remembered the children who mocked Elisha for his baldness. But few of the inmates of 99 Gower Street, then The Spectator's home, knew what to make of its proprietor. Harry (who died last week) represented himself as a dour engineer with a machine-tool business in Dundee, but he was a dealer in companies who had been dealt this one by Jim Slater. Whatever his ambitions for it, or for himself, they were disappointed — partly because his sense of humour could politely be called mischievous. He sacked his first editor, Nigel Lawson, who was fighting a marginal seat, by telegram on the day of the election. This did not help Harry's hopes of recognition in the Conservative party. When he found that the editor's secretary had put her friends on the free list for Christmas, he crossed them all out, but the circulation collapsed, and ceased to be audited. Another secretary distinguished herself by the terms of her letter of resignation. She did not, so she told him, welcome his advances — adding that she welcomed other people's advances, but not his.
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