Lessons from the master
I KNOW what Harold Wincott meant: `The mind of any columnist with frequent and regular deadlines to meet' (as he wrote, meeting- a deadline 30 years ago) `becomes, inevitably, something of a stock- pot.' True, but few stocks are as refreshing and nourishing as Wincott's. Today the Wincott foundation makes the awards for financial journalism which are regarded in that world as its highest honour. This week at the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor and the Governor of the Bank of England mark the Foundation's twenty-first birth- day. I would like them to mark it (after all, there was £100,000 in the kitty when they started, and it has rolled up with the years) by reprinting Wincott's work. It reads as freshly as ever, and we can learn from it. The Conservative 'Positive European Group' which this week urges us to jump straight into the European Monetary Sys- tem should read what Wincott was writing in the days when sterling had a fixed exchange rate. We have, he said, a peculiar aptitude for picking the wrong rate, and in any case a country's currency is like ICI's share price: 'It's just not realistic to pre- tend that its value is the same, decade after decade.'
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