CITY DIARY
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
To my collection of helpful ministerial guidance for exporters I have added a speech by Lord Winterbottom. This noble is, as of course you realise, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Public Building and Works. His message is that the sit-at-home• should get out into the export field.
Lord Winterbottom thinks that 'the tide has perceptibly turned' and that 'exporting is being taken very, very seriously indeed in the United Kingdom today.' But. he says, 'of course there are still a few stay-at-homes. -Their lack of patriotism and initiative appals me. I am also rather surprised that these firms, which are presumably in business for their own profit, are willingly denying themselves so many advantages.'
I don't know which to admire more: Lord Winterbottom's searching economic insight— for, once he mentions it, one realises that only stupidity keeps British companies from dealing in the remunerative, uncompetitive, easily-ser- viced and Anglophone markets that stretch from Calais to Yokohama—or his choice of locale. This was a speech-he made in Munich. I bet it gives the Germans something to think about.
A few dukes always lend tone to a boardroom —they are especially popular with the Scottish banks : generals still command-a price, though ex-ministers are falling off and baronets frankly a drug on the Market : there are buying orders for such few lines in retired permanent secre- taries to the Ministry of Aviation as appear. But rare indeed is the company that can elect the Dean of St Paul's to its board—adding that he succeeds the Archdeacon of Canterbury, a very senior cleric among whose distinctions is to have installed each of the last two bishops in every diocese of the southern province:
This board change is announced by the Ecclesiastical Insurance Office—not, as its name might imply, some offshoot of the Church Commissioners, but an independent company, now eighty-three years .old and showing a balance sheet £5.8 million strong. Although it has to compete on its merits with every other insurer, it carries policies on almost every major Anglican church and cathedral in the country: whether it stands to lose £2 million if York Minister falls down I have forborne to ask. Out of its profits—£410,896 before tax—it makes charitable grants, last year of £120,000, spreading them round the dioceses in proportion to the sources of premium income. It runs a life assurance scheme for the clergy and had the sat- isfaction of seeing it head the charts in Which?
The Dean—who is the highest-ranking cleric on the board, if I am right in thinking that deans trump provosts and canons—will not find among his responsibilities that of getting the company a Stock Exchange quotation. It used to have one, but declined to supply the infor- mation that the Council had taken to requiring. This information, it was felt, would only be useful to someone who wanted to take the company over : and that isn't the idea at all.
Having a spare acre smack in the middle of the City of London is the sort of thing that should happen to you or me: but, life being what it is, it has happened to Barclays Bank. They are moving the chief foreign branch into a new office, and that releases the building on the corner of Fenchurch Street and Gracechurch Street, which will be pulled down. The site won't be sold—Barclays, the City Corporation and the City of London Real Property Company are using it to put up a 300-foot tall office block.
It reinforces my belief that the rewarding thing to do with the joint-stock banks is to take them over and shut them down. So if you get an offer from C. F. Enterprises (Holdings)—all in paper, of course, with perhaps a touch of the unsecured loan stock—you will know that my financial advisers, the old firm of Davenport and Bull, have given the scheme their blessing. The National Provincial got somewhere near the idea when they tried to demolish their former head office, but they were stopped—quite rightly, I think : it's a splendid building, with statues all round the roof—and seemed to lose heart. Their new head office is also, as it hap- pens, built on a one-acre site, which gives a line on what Barclays site must be worth. The ground rent on the National Provincial's build- ing is £288,000 a year. and this still left the developer with a profit of £8 million.
My advisers say that. for these purposes, a site value is something like twenty-two times the ground rent, which, on the National Provincial figures, would make an acre worth £6 million or more. But they also say that, when the National Provincial deal was being done, the level of office rent was £3-odd a square foot. The National Provincial had to pay £5-odd—hence the developer's healthy profit. This figure is now quite well known, so that in future deals site- owners will get more and developers less. On those assumptions, £8 million for Barclays' acre would not be out of line. A nice price.
A sorry lapse last week allowed us to call the M and G Group the oldest and biggest of the unit trust groups. It is the oldest; but undoub- tedly the biggest is Save and Prosper. Mea culpa, as it happens. My apologies to both sides.
The Bank of England runs an Intelligence Summary, conveying to its officers what they need to know that the press is saying. I am honoured to learn that my diary has found its place in the summary: 'Christopher Fildes
writes in the SPECTATOR that the Governor has delivered a public rebuke to the Prime Minister,' or what not. So here is a note to which the Summary is especially welcome : if officers of the Bank will proceed in an orderly manner to the discount office—presenting themselves, as custom requires, before 2.30 p.m.—they can then try their hands at borrowing one and sixpence. The office (which handles the Bank's money market operations) might only charge them a 'market rate' of 71 per cent. But even Bank rate at 8 per cent would not be too much to pay if it enables one to read the words of wisdom in the original.
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