Where are the foes of yesteryear?
Roger Seelig
THE INSIDERS by Judi Bevan Piatkus, £14.99, pp. 385 Judi Bevan's background as a financial journalist has enabled her to provide a live- ly insight into those heady City days of the Eighties in her first novel, The Insiders. The book is a period vignette of the then Lon- don takeover scene. Her wide range of con- tacts has provided the background for the carefully researched verisimilitude in every detail and location — déjà vu for those of us involved. Together with the necessary injection of sex and naked criminality, they combine to produce a compelling novel an urban variant of Baywatch.
More specifically it evokes the wildest extremes of merger-mania during the Thatcherite boom which, for all its draw- backs, did much to reshape and strengthen British industry. In the book, the sleeping giant — Butlers Biscuits — is transformed into a world force. All the familiar 1980s characters are represented — third-rate stockbrokers, gross American arbitrageurs, ambitious merchant bankers and greedy, power-mad industrialists, each with larger- than-life appetites for profit at all costs. Reality may be less extreme, but the warn- ing should be clear for the future. In such heated contests, the likelihood of distor- tions must be ever-present.
Behind the frivolous world of non-stop dining, fast cars and first-class travel, the author highlights the complete inadequacy of overweight but undermanned regulatory structures and the way fraudsters must comply with the draconian powers of the DTI who do not even give suspects the `right to silence' afforded murderers and rapists. Statutory teeth for self-regulation by a single body staffed by leading current practitioners, accountable and reviewable independently, would be my proposal for effective city policy. Controlling the sex and greed of insiders remains a more intractable long-term human problem.
Meanwhile, this novel emphasises the continuing problems of policing a complex and dynamic stockmarket where both the prizes and costs for all concerned are huge. compulsive reading.
Roger Seelig was the advisor to Guinness during its takeover bid for Distillers in 1985.
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