CITY AND SUBURBAN
It's ITO Keynes's missing policeman turns up in Major's bonnet
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
John Major must come to Edinburgh with a rabbit in his bonnet. Without it, this last stop on his guided tour of British beauty- spots — first Bath, then Birmingham — looks doomed to end in temper and trade wars. No country has more to lose from them, dependent as we now are on saving at home and selling abroad. Luckily, though, if the Prime Minister looks closely he will find a fine fat rabbit, put there by John Maynard Keynes Meth a little help from me. Keynes, half a century ago, was Planning a new economic order, to exorcise the years of depression and protection. It was to be built round three new institu- tions. The International Monetary Fund would exercise a banker's discipline, the World Bank would provide for develop- ment, and the International Trade Organi- sation would be the policeman of free trade. The Fund and Bank are part of the landscape today. The ITO has not surfaced, yet. Some of the work that Keynes planned for it was caught up in the General Agree- ment on Tariffs and Trade, but the Gatt secretariat never had, and does not have, the independence and clout that Keynes planned for his agency and conferred upon the Fund and Bank. It is a second-division outfit, working to a Swiss economic bureau- crat called Arthur Dunkel, who would have retired by now if anybody could be found to take over his job. Who, though, would be a helpless shuttlecock between the American men of steel and the French men of rape? Who can be sure that, after such a batter- ing, the job will still be there? Gatt's diffi- culty is the Prime Minister's opportunity. At his Edinburgh summit, he should pro- pose that Keynes's grand design should be completed and ITO called into being. The logic is as strong as ever, and the need is more urgent and the danger more definite than for many years. He could offer ITO a home and a director-general. He might even have his eye on Margaret Thatcher, unless (as I hope) he is saving her up to be Bishop of Durham. He needs an initiative and a good cause. It adds up to ITO.
Spit and polish
THE summit meeting is to discuss the future of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (voted Turkey of the Year by the British Turkey Federation, ahead of Eldorado and Canary Wharf) so it should
be over quite soon. It cannot be too soon for the lordly investment managers of Edin- burgh. For them, the summit's cast of thou- sands might just as well be a troupe of New Age travellers, resting their caravans in Charlotte Square. They are suffering, and, what is worse, so is their fine office furni- ture. Every French polisher in Edinburgh, they say, has been taken away and co-opted to buff an enormous new table, specially commissioned by the host government and carpentered for the occasion. It is designed to seat 156 people.
Fruitier and nuttier
I SUPPOSE that if my name was Cadbury, and I had spent 30 years as a director of Cadbury and 14 as chairman, and my broth- er was also a director of Cadbury and was now chief executive, even though the busi- ness belonged to the usual nameless gaggle of institutional shareholders and not to the Cadburys, I might think that shareholders counted for less than directors. This week brings Sir Adrian Cadbury's definitive report on how to govern companies, but the shareholders' only part in it is to see if the directors have done as he says. Three of them must be non-executive, to sit on the nomination committee and the remunera- tion committee and the audit committee, to see that the board has a chairman and a chief executive, and to be paid at a suitable rate by the hour. As a job opportunity scheme on mutual principles, this is in a class of its own. The Stock Exchange will build a new rule into its book, making com- panies say whether they have complied with the Cadbury code, and if not why not. It must make a change from snubbing small investors in Government securities or tin- kering with Taurus, but I do wish the Stock Exchange would put this nannying aside until it can make a better fist of its basic business, which is providing an exchange
for stock. Improving the government of companies is a job for their owners.
Call me, I'm Amex
I CAN exclusively reveal the next scandal to break over Norman Lamont. It will be alleged that young ladies telephone his office and leave messages, urging him to ring them back in Brighton. If they cannot get him, they try me. I come back from lunch to find a note on my desk: please ring Miss Macdermot at an 0273 number . . . With a brief frisson I recognise the code, but then I remember that this is American Express's number, and that Miss Macder- mot rings me up to chivvy me, very politely, about my bill, so if Mr Lamont finds him- self chivvied about his credit-card bill, that does not worry me. Nor does the Treasury contribution to his lawyer's bill. Other Chancellors, other bills. The Treasury chipped in when Nigel Lawson, steamed up about Johnson Matthey Bankers, went over the top of his brief and was sued for libel. Chancellors come and go, but mandarins rule, and the mandarin who passed this Chancellor's expenses is not the man to go high, wide and handsome with public money. 'It's impossible', says my man in the Reform Club, `to have a hard and fast line between official and non-official things where Chancellors are involved. When these harooshes arise you have to make a judgment.' Mr Lamont says that he just wants to get on with charting a successful course for the British economy for the rest of the decade. Now that does worry me.
Gogarty's law
MY IRISH economic correspondent, John Jameson, writes: You wrongly describe as implausible (City and suburban, 28 Novem- ber) Marc McDonald's revolutionary theo- ry that Ireland is short of bars. Shortage is relative, and in assessing the elasticity of demand, which may be infinite, McDonald has argued by analogy from Gogarty's The- orem — that there is no such thing as a large whiskey. Oliver St. John Gogarty maintained, in As I was going down Sacicville Street, that he had always had, or could at any rate imagine, a larger one. A small whiskey, on the other hand, was unhappily a matter of everyday experience.
Previous page
