CITY AND SUBURBAN
Let's have a look at another five? No, deal me out of Lloyd's
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
The finality statements have gone out from Lloyd's of London. This is what Lloyd's calls the letters to its members, set- ting out the terms on which they can square off their liabilities and walk away or, if they want to, try again. They are told, as they have been told time and time again over two decades, that Lloyd's has put its bad old days behind it. Never again will their underwriter take their money and invest it in an ocean-going yacht or in the making of blue movies. He will not lay off their risks, on terms of his own choosing, with a rein- surance company which he controls, or if he does he will not become chairman of Lloyd's. He will not expect his rewards to come packaged in brown envelopes or sur- rounded by a picture-frame. He will not deal himself aces off the bottom of the pack, by reserving the best lines of business for groups of insiders to which he belongs. He will have been schooled in the law of agency, and will understand his obligations, both legal and moral. If he should have the misfortune to fall out with the members whose business he manages, and the matter comes to court, his evidence should be such as a High Court judge is able to accept. Lloyd's has promised this all over again, but I have to say that I have passed the Point where I would be ready to take it on trust. If the choice were mine, I would stay away from Lloyd's. Its members have to make a poker-player's choice, such as was !et out by the American poet e e cummings in six lines called 'In Dives' Dive': It is late at night and still I am losing But still I am steady and unaccusing: So long as the Declaration guards My right to an equal number of cards, It is nothing to me who runs the dive. Let's have a look at another five.
Pedigree cats meet . . .
A MAN who has made himself £33 million does not require my sympathy on top of it, but I am uneasy to see Sandy Anderson paraded as the newest and plumpest of the fat cats, They are the company chairmen and directors who have gorged themselves at their shareholders' expense on creamy salaries, bonuses, share options and pen- sion plans, with a nice plump cushion of banknotes to fall on if ever they should lose their footing. They are now padding on to
fluff themselves out with El Tips, the long- term (well, not very long) incentive plans linked to some measure of their company's performance. Nowadays they may not even have to ask their boards' approval. These matters are left to the remuneration com- mittee, as Sir Richard Greenbury's wretched code prescribes. Guided by its consultants, the committee will choose the it la carte diet best suited to their cats and most likely to encourage them to get out of their baskets in the morning.
. . . a working mouser
MR ANDERSON is not that breed of boardroom cat. Ten years ago he was a manager working for TIP Europe, an American-owned company that owned and leased trailers. He and some senior col- leagues bought it out and brought it to the stock-market, where another American company, GE Capital, bid for it and took it over. GE wanted him to stay on and for two years he did, but he then joined Porter- brook, British Rail's carriage-leasing com- pany, thinking .he might have a chance of buying that out. So, in a competitive auc- tion, he did. Then Stagecoach, the bus com- pany now busily collecting railway franchis- es, bought Porterbrook and made Mr Anderson a rich man. Did he get Porter- brook too cheaply? That was scarcely his fault. Did Stagecoach pay too much? We shall see, but companies on bidding binges often get a rush of blood to the wallet. None of this puts Mr Anderson on all four paws with Lord This, Sir That and the cream of the boardrooms. They might even complain that he was a working mouser.
Numbers up
MY form master, Horace Merrick, main- tained that a moderately intelligent hen could count up to four. Really bright hens,
he said, could reach five. This would put them at an advantage over Don Cruick- shank, the telephone regulator, who is run- ning out of numbers after having got as far as one. Only last year he had hoped to solve his problems by making us all put an extra 1 in our telephone numbers. As Auberon Waugh, the mathematician, pointed out at the time, this made no more numbers avail- able: it merely made the existing numbers longer. Now Mr Cruickshank wants a recount. Before that, he should travel to America and find out how that country, with more people and more telephones than ours, gets along with three-figure area codes and seven-figure numbers. Or he should make way for an intelligent hen.
A disease of money
IN THE gunfight at the M4 Corral, the Old Lady has come off the fence. Yes, she says, there is too much money about, in our pockets and in the banks and the building societies, and if we are not careful it will lose its value, as it has before: 'Rapid money growth' (says the Bank of England's inflation report) 'will stimulate demand and output, reduce spare capacity, and lead ulti- mately to higher inflation.' How ultimately? Well, after the election — unless, of course, it can be cut off at the pass and gunned down in a hail of higher interest rates. This is fighting talk from the Old Lady, but I like to hear it. She should stick to the the idea that inflation is a disease of money, caused by excess. Since her name and promise appears on our banknotes, it is her job to make them worth having.
Taking lunch seriously
DISCOVERY of the week comes from Professor Cary Cooper, who rides tall on the range of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He says that we are not paying enough atten- tion to lunch. Research is said to have shown that when we grab a sandwich at our desk, we feel irritable and light-headed in the afternoon, at a cost to our. employers estimated with absurd precision at £32 mil- lion a year. How we feel after a serious lunch, the professor does not say. More research is needed, starting in the City, and (of course) more public funding.
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