C'MON, EVERYBODY, GET 'HAPPY'

A new socio-economic class is in the ascendant.

Simon Brocklebank-Fowler identifies it

and explains how it came about

THE CURRENT bankers' bonanza in the City signals a wider revolution in who makes what in Britain. For the first time in our history, you are better off 'advising' than 'doing'. The new advisers earn so much, so quickly, that by the age of 45 they have evolved from their beginnings as Young Urban Professionals — 'Yuppies' into High Asset Professionals — `Happies'. Only a handful of entrepreneurs and chief executives can begin to match a Happy's lifetime earnings. If you could buy shares in these people, you'd be the Bill Gates of the 21st century.

Happies stand at the apex of Britain's only really successful sector, financial and business services, which now accounts for one quarter of our GDP. Happies get rich by earning the salary of a utilities direc- tor, but beginning at half his age. They don't take risks — they let their clients and employers do that. They don't believe particularly in the Unit- ed Kingdom, or in cor- ner shop economics. They won't be joining the Conservative party this side of the next gen- eral election. Indeed, some of them seem to have ended up running the Labour party.

Happies couldn't be more different from the Sloane Rangers described by Peter York in the early 1980s. York conjured up an ancient, benign caste which managed its ever-diminishing family silver in a fog of loud humour, Bollinger and New & Ling- wood cords. Barbour's profits soared. Sloanes were an amiable metaphor for a failing nation, and everybody wanted a piece of them. By contrast, if Happies have inherited any silver, they have long since replaced it with brushed steel cutlery bought at Conran. A Happy's attitude to economic failure is not befuddled hilarity but relentless hostility. Their dominant motivation is financial rather than social. Barbour is feeling the pain; it has just announced a collapse in profits.

Happies exist in significant numbers across a whole stratum of City institutions, management consultancies and global `business advisory' firms. Recent events remind us that Happies can prosper in the new professions too. Even in the City, earning what traders are already calling a `Draper' (£200,000 a year, named after the hapless Labour lobbyist) is going some. In fact, media, advertising and public relations have been delivering the bacon big-time since Lords Bell, Chadlington and Saatchi first spun. Just one UK PR firm's board is today graced by no fewer than eight self- made millionaires.

Becoming a Happy is, however, by no means easy. Happies recruit in their own meritocratic image, if not exclusively from their own class. Members of the new cadre therefore lack the timidity of older, less educated orders about their own value to their clients and employers. In a snapshot of the age, the Queen's new communica- tions secretary, Simon Lewis, 40, Oxford- educated and a former Warburg spin- doc- tor, is set to earn nearly three times as much as Sir Robert Fellowes, her outgoing private secretary, a non-graduate Knight Templar of the old service class.

versity contemporary reports, 'The downside of a bad call in his league is premature retirement to the Bahamas for a decade or three.' Owning a bank is a risky business, as Peter Baring found out. Being employed by one, in the scheme of things, is not. The per- centage players are inheriting the earth.

The new cadre also question the value of British sovereignty. In part, this is because history finally caught up with the City, still the centre of the known universe for Happies. In the Eight- ies, the Americans kicked the shop door down and the roof fell in. The Germans, Dutch and Swiss have built quality street- stalls from the wreckage, but the Ameri- cans own the market freehold, as they do in almost any business which uses people with fast-firing neurons. Outside the law and the media agencies, you have to look hard to find a Happy who works for an identifiably British institution. London is fast becoming the Wimbledon of the global professional services circuit, the place where the rules were invented and the game is still played, but only the foreigners ever win.

Happies, however, do not relish the prospect of being super-remunerated ball- boys. This explains the stony reception which greets Eurosceptics in the Square Mile. An English director of a German- owned merchant bank complained after a recent anti-EMU address by a shadow Cabinet minister, 'Can't he see that there isn't going to be a single management job in my firm in London in five years if we aren't in [EMU]?'

Happies differ from the old commercial and military elites in other ways too. They have, for instance, a breathtakingly narrow experience of British society. If you com- mand men in the field, farm an estate or run a factory, you cannot help but interact with a mass of unskilled working people. Patrician relationships may have been uneasy, but they were not uninformed. Mutual understanding crept in. In the audit of war, this accommodation delivered us national survival. By contrast, it is possible today to be a member of the elite and to have no relationships at all outside a circle which is sitting pretty close to the top of the bell curve. In the services firms of the Nineties, even the secretaries are likely to be trilingual graduates.

This is resulting in the exclusion from mainstream society of many of those who have historically been its mortar. Unless you work with them as clients or as domes- tic servants you don't get to see Happies, let alone talk to them. They're either in the office, or on a plane, or cocooned in a 24- hour security development in Docklands, Pimlico or the suburbs. They leave the country at weekends to stay in corporate ski chalets in Courcheval or with friends in Umbria. Their children go to a handful of hot-house independent schools in the Lon- don area, led by Eton and Westminster, from which the old order is slowly being excluded by ruthless academic selection.

These people do not experience England outside a corridor running between Heath- row and Canary Wharf. The result is that kinship and duty are perhaps too often lim- ited to their own. One corporate lawyer laments the new ethic: 'My grandfather was a country solicitor. When he died, there were 300 people from the county at his funeral, half of them owing him money. In recent years, this firm has brought down small family businesses to reclaim a few thousand pounds in unpaid fees. He would be turning in his grave.'

Above all, Happies have opted out of the governance of the nation. They haven't got the time, or even a sense that it is impor- tant. To the extent that government affects them as regulator, it is likely to be Brussels or Washington which is calling the shots. The House of Commons, for all its perfect- ly bright ex-£20,000 a year research assis- tant MPs, contains under two dozen souls who would pass muster in the eyes of the new professionals. One of them is the Prime Minister, who is married to one of their own. Another is the Leader of the Opposition, who isn't. Archie Norman, the MacKinsey-trained Tory vice-chairman (with an earned worth of £10 million), is their apostolic representative.

Because Happies have turned out to be the real big winners of the Thatcher experi- ence, the Tories feel that they should be by nature Conservative, and have launched various initiatives to get at them, with con- tact programmes like FastTrack 2000 held at ritzy West End venues. But Tories and Labour alike are finding that the new pro- fessionals transcend party politics. Many may yet vote Conservative, but if Mr Blair wins again, they can console themselves that he governs a country whose fortunes are increasingly marginal to their own future success.

Simon Brocklebank-Fowler is a City market- ing consultant.

I admire her! How she manages to juggle a career, a failed marriage and a drink problem is beyond me.'