A spectator sees most of the City's game
Christopher Fildes on the comedy of a financial world changing at breakneck speed imy arrival was marked by a memorandum: 'LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auheron Waugh have joined the staff of The Spectator. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel. Galley's Libel and Slander may be consulted in my office. Nigel Lawson, Editor.' We survived that, and in time Algy Cluff, as chairman, suggested that I should write a column on matters City and suburban. The phrase was Milton's — from Paradise Regained, Dot Wordsworth tells me — but Captain Threadneedle, my racing correspondent, derived it from Epsom, home of the City and Suburban Handicap. That seemed appropriate, for (as the Sunday papers used to tell us) all human life is there. My book, A City Spectator (Nicholas Brealey, £12.99), is built on and from these observations of a City changing at breakneck speed, but still intensely human. You may recognise some of them: I know I should keep a straight face, but the spectacle of banks finding new ways to lose money never fails to tickle me. Their ingenuity is breathtaking. Look at them now, as they come over with their hands up and admit their exposure to Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund. Giving capital to a bank, says that worldly banker Nicholas Sibley, is like giving a gallon of beer to a drunk. You know what will conic of it, but you can't know which wall he will choose. I never thought that, this time, they would choose a hedge.
I recorded Lloyd's of London's long chapter of accidents (and worse) — You can go to sea in a sieve, like the Jumblies, or you can join the wrong syndicate at Lloyd's— but! noted its resilience: Times are getting harder at Lloyd's, where globe-flying brokers have found themselves demoted — from their usual first class, right down to business class. An intrepid birdman has been telling me of the experience. 'Jolly exciting', he says. 'Do you know, I could see the wings?'
The people who wanted to sign us up for Europe's exchange rate mechanism — and what a traumatic experience that was — now want to sign us up for the euro. I never cared for either project: To rely on the ERM as an external discipline is to say that we either cannot or will not manage our own affairs and would prefer that others acted for us. They will, of course, act for themselves. 'Nations on the gold standard,' said Churchill, when as Chancellor he signed us up for it, 'are like ships whose gangways are joined together.' No one cared to tell him that ships with gangways joined together are singularly illequipped to sail the seas. What gangways are good for is boarding.
Edith Cresson was the French prime minister who doubted English virility and as a European Commissioner put her dentist on the payroll: Francois Mitterrand's patronage gave Edith Cresson her start. 'What an odd thing to do,' said Stain Yassukovich. 'You might give an old girlfriend a Cartier brooch, but you don't make her prime minister.' Or a European Commissioner. At Polly Peck, Asil Nadir had his own ideas about patronage:
I went to Polly's clearance sale. 'What would be an appropriate car,' the receiver asked me, 'in a company of this kind, for the chairman's girlfriend?' I demurred. 'What about a top-of-the-range BMW?' I agreed. 'Well, what would you say to 14 of them?' They were on the books as consultants.
I found a novel response to the frenzy of the house market:
My plans to sell my house and move into the Ritz are beginning to take shape. I would like to think that, as a regular customer, I could reserve a room there for not much more than £1,000 a week, which would compare very favourably with the cost of mortgaging a house in London. The art will be to time that move for the moment when the bubble bursts and prices start to fall. Book now.
My assiduous railway correspondent, I. K. Gricer, observed that the Post Office had no more use for its railway underneath the City: This line, he says, should be relabelled Crossrail. Then to whizz from the City to Paddington, we need only buy a first-class stamp and climb on board. Some of us might have to squeeze to fit into a narrowgauge railway engineered for mailbags, but the Gricer project certainly beats pretending to build a standard-gauge Crossrail, one of these days, with let's-pretend private finance.
The pretence about Crossrail goes on, but the National Westminster Bank's recurrent failure to find a new chairman suggested to I.K Gricer another parallel from railway history: As W.S. Gilbert wrote to the directors of the Metropolitan Railway: 'Saturday mornings, though occurring at frequent and well-regulated intervals, always seem to take this railway by surprise.'
&pings' disasters seemed to recur at /00year intervals: Nick Leeson is off to Singapore to complete the research on his book, Changi Cuisine: 100 healthy ways to serve fish-heads and rice. The book I want to read will be Peter Baring's, and will be called How We Let this Little Berk Bring the House Down. The bankers' mistaken belief was that (as they told the Bank of England) the business was easy. Pleasantly surprising results, SO Peter Baring called them, and pleasantly surprising bonuses all round, including a million for the chairman. Squeaks of warning from the markets, but the %rings thought they knew better. If! can reach suitable terms with Mr Baring, I might write his book myself.
A headline for Jacques Attali, the boondoggle banker who went in for marble halls — Knock, knock. Who's there? Attali! Attali who? Attali and completely over the top and a variant fir Adair Turner, invited to square the government's circle on pensions: Knock, knock. Who's there? Adair! Adair who? Adair say they'll fudge it, as usual. Compliance became the City's great growth industry, and the banks were forced to make their customers identify themselves by showing their passports and gas bills. Coutts's most eminent customer seems to have fibbed at this: Buckingham Palace Dear Sirs, In reply to your letter, I am obliged to point out that Her Majesty does not have a gas hill. Gas is supplied to the Palace, but payment is adjusted by the Lord Chamberlain and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. Nor, since a passport is a request for assistance issued by the Foreign Secretary in her name, is there any reason why she should direct one to herself. If you insist on pictorial identification, pull a tenner out of the till and have a look at it. Now be good chaps and forget all this nonsense.
A. Cheesecutter-Hatt (Maj.), Sharp-Stick in-Waiting Life is a whole, said Churchill, and luck is a whole: Ever since the Lombards gave their name to a street of bankers, the City has flourished with its doors open to newcomers. Addison, in The (first) Spectator, conjured up the cosmopolitan traders at the Royal Exchange and called it an emporium for the whole earth. I have been lucky to catch it at its most vital and inventive. For me, as for so many of its daily inhabitants, it has been a way of life.
City and Suburban, p. 30; Spectator Bookshop, p. 48.
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