CITY AND SUBURBAN
Reality is breaking in all over, and it comes as a terrible shock
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Scene: Hollywood. Two functionaries are comparing notes. One of them makes the ritual inquiry: 'How's business?' The other blanches. 'Business? It's so terrible, they're firing the sons-in-law.' This is the ultimate test for Barclays, until now a fami- ly bank at heart although the families have long since ceased to own it, and for Martin Taylor, its new-found chief executive. When I asked him two months ago what he was doing, he said: 'Listening.' Now he's talking. Words like 'snobbish' have set the sons-in-law trembling, and in Mr Taylor's business there will be no security for any- one, except what can be earned. Such ideas tend to come as a shock. They cannot be much more fun in Sainsbury's, where price wars in the supermarkets have brought sackings to head office. Even British Tele- com finds that it can economise on well- paid managers. I await the first board to economise on non-executive directors. The Cadbury code makes no provision for this. I imagine that the choices will be made by de-nomination committees, with (of course) generous ideas on compensation. Across the City, Mr Taylor can watch reali- ty breaking in at the Barbican arts centre, where the managing director is cast as the villain of a bloody drama. Her critics com- plain that it was once a happy, people-ori- entated place for losing money. Then she turned up and started firing people. Surely, says her former deputy, the City of London is so incredibly rich that it need not work on these Thatcherite lines. Spendthrift nephews, when chatting up rich uncles, do well to keep such thoughts to themselves. As for Barclays, it is neither so avuncular nor so rich as it was. Mr Taylor thinks it should earn three times as much. His next step will be to set up a small and functional head office, rattling around in the vast and unfunctional head office building, alias the Islamic Cultural Centre. To sell it would make sense but would attract a vast bill for Value Added Tax. I hope it is insured.
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