Shallow end of the pool
Good old J. B. Rubens FGA, managing director of Central and District Properties Limited is, I am glad to report, a regular reader of the SPECTATOR of long standing. In this diary of 20 March this year I referred to 'pool operations in the property market' having pushed rents in the West End
to ridiculously high levels.
Mr J. B. Rubens and his joint managing director, a Mr Barnett Shine, have written to say they have been in the property busi- ness for a considerable time and regard ' themselves as having experience in the business but do not know the meaning of 'pool operations in the property market'.
Not getting a reply, persistent Mr Rubens has written again asking for an answer and saying 'If, as it seems, you are employing an incompetent and inadequate financial writer, it might be better if you went through some of the good people now redundant in Fleet Street and found somebody who did have proper qualifications. Failing that suggestion, it would be better if Skinflint retired altogether.'
OK, Mr Rubens, do your worst. Your suggestion that the Editor should replace me with a good financial writer from those redundant in Fleet Street is a contradiction in terms. No good financial writer ever needs a job, except as an act of charity to help and explain to those less fortunate than himself. His task is to warn the unsuspecting against the grasping and the grasping against themselves.
Property booms through history, whether in Balzac's Paris or the New York of the 1930s, have been followed by their moment of truth. In those days the property com- panies were hurt, but now presumably it is the gullible tenantry who bound themselves to 7-year rent-revision clauses. The SPEC- TATOR takes a dispassionate view of this scene from its freehold, besieged, as always, by property dealers' sly approaches to sell.
I have been tied up recently, Mr Rubens, trying to make money, and I have not had time to give your letter the consideration it deserves, but I promise you an answer soon and a first-hand anecdote about Central and District Properties' all-consuming devo- tion to small print.
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