Lenin and Sid Waddell provide words to describe the leader of the Tube strike
MARTIN VANDER WEYER Don't mind me asking,' a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, tut aren't you Sid Waddell?' I looked blank. 'Go on, you are, aren't you,' his mate insisted, pumping my hand. `Hiya, Sid.' Thanks to an on-board internet connection and Google Images, I was able to prove to my new friends that I was not the veteran metaphor-mangler of television darts commentary. Nevertheless the three of us agreed that I might just have been mistaken for him across the fog of a crowded club in presmoking-ban days, and I felt a strange affinity with my newly discovered lookalike. I shall certainly be dipping into his new book, Bellies and Bullseyes (Ebury Press), and I was delighted to hear him on the radio on Sunday morning in the unfamiliar role of political commentator. As the son of a Northumberland miner, Sid was holding forth in eloquent defence of Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT union whose strike disrupted the London Underground for two days last week, at great cost and irritation to the capital but without winning any significant concessions for RMT members. I found myself siding with Sid — and disagreeing with almost everyone else who has opined on this topic, including Will Hutton of the Observer. It's not that I empathise with Sid's rose-tinted nostalgia for a lost era of working-class solidarity. It's just that I think Bob does a service to society by reminding us how economically and socially destructive the era of union militancy really was.
I have followed Crow's career — at a safe distance — ever since he became the London Underground representative on the national executive of the newly merged Rail, Maritime and Transport union in the early Nineties. In 1994, when I was writing here about London Transport's aspiration to create a 'Decently Modern Metro' by 2007 (wonder what happened to that?), a senior LT executive whispered to me that he had spotted a bust of Lenin on Crow's desk. A card-carrying communist until he softened up and joined Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party in 1997, he's the most recognisable of the 'awkward squad' of left-wing union leaders. The others, however, are cleverer and more ambitious: like Paul Kenney of the GMB, scourge of private equity, they use smart PR to make their arguments; like Tony Woodley of the T&G, they are seen at the negotiating table when the fate of companies such as MG Rover is decided; they're all eager to do deals with Gordon Brown, however tough he says he's going to be on public-sector pay deals. But Bob just wants to smash capitalism. He reminds us why it's vital that inflation is never allowed to let rip again, so that we never return to the strikedriven wage spiral of the Seventies; why it's so important that managers nurture positive, direct relationships with their workers, leaving no space for union militants whose real agenda is subversion. To adopt a phrase attributed to Lenin, Bob is a useful idiot. After the public hostility and scorn poured on Bob last week for his pointlessly damaging Tube strike — to adopt a phrase attributed to Sid Waddell — he must be 'as happy as a penguin in a microwave'.
A parable of panic selling Congratulations to Tullow Oil, the exploration 'minnow' which was widely expected to join the FTSE-100 this week. Even if some last-minute hiccup denies it promotion to blue-chip status this time round, Tullow still offers a stirring tale of intrepid entrepreneurship. It began in 1985, when Irish accountant Aidan Heavey — who had no prior experience of the energy industry — named his fledgling company after a village near Dublin and ventured into the gasfields of Senegal. 'Dallas was the biggest show on television at the time,' he told the Times. 'I guess I just wanted to be like Bobby Ewing.' Tullow has gone on to explore oil and gas fields in Pakistan, various parts of darkest Africa and the North Sea — a spread of assets which has improved its attractiveness to investors. The announcement of a potential 1.3 billionbarrel discovery in Ghana has finally boosted Tullow's market capitalisation into FTSE-100 territory, at more than £3.9 billion.
You could have bought Tullow shares early in 2004 for a pound each; now they're worth £5.50. More pertinently, for £3 a pop you could have bought the Tullow shares sold by our television critic James Delingpole in May last year, when the price dived temporarily on bad news from Pakistan and Gabon, and you'd still be sitting on an 83 per cent profit. After listening to a passionate lament from James at a Spectator party about his rollercoaster Tullow ride — he was 127 per cent up before the dive — I persuaded him to write about the lessons learned: 'When the time comes, get out quickly. If I'd sold on the first day of the fall, instead of going, "Oh my god. This isn't happening" and selling on the third, I would have lost only 10 per cent of my shares' value rather than 25 per cent.' But of course hindsight says he'd have been better not to have sold at all. I asked James this week whether he had managed to climb back on the Tullow bandwagon. 'My portfolio is shite,' he replied succinctly, 'because of course inevitably I sold my Tullow shares at the wrong price and only have about 50 quid's worth.' We'll hear more about the rest of James's portfolio shortly.
Righteous dame 'Finance bores the pants off me,' Dame Anita Roddick once declared. The founder of the Body Shop chain, who died this week, never hid her contempt for what she called the 'pin-striped dinosaurs' of the City, and the feeling was mutual. After Body Shop went public in 1984, bankers and brokers were constantly irritated by her campaigning for remote tribespeople and animal rights when they thought she should have been minding the shop. She took a final barrage of flak, not only from City cynics but also from animal rights groups, when she sold Body Shop to the EOreal cosmetics group for £652 million in March last year, collecting £130 million for herself — at that stage EOreal was still using ingredients tested on animals. But still we should pause to salute her as the creator, and marketer on a global scale, of pamper-yourself-and-feel-righteous ethical consumerism: other brands may be a lot hotter than Body Shop these days (I'm told Lush is the one to watch) but they are all Roddick's imitators.
Previous page
