CITY AND SUBURBAN
Improvement means deterioration, and Sir Peter says it's irreversible
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Patria( Hutber was the City Editor who laid down that improvement meant deteri- oration. I worry, therefore, when the deputy chairman of Barclays, delivering the Patrick Hutber lecture, tells the world: 'We are now in an irreversible process of improved communications.' It seems to be accelerating. No doubt it worries the lec- turer, too. He is Sir Peter Middleton, who used to run the Treasury and when I first knew him was the best press officer it ever had. Now he chooses to ask: 'When will the City learn to communicate?' It is a good and a topical question, and his short answer is: Never. Not if the idea is that some great and good voice should speak for the City as a whole. It is hard enough to make a specif- ic case, as the banks have found out. They would like to persuade Westminster and Whitehall of the — not very difficult notion that a strong financial system helps to build a strong economy. Instead they produce dreadful results and then are charged with profiteering. Sir Peter tells them not to get introspective or feel hurt. Instead, I would urge them to ask why the present Chancellor has got away with using them as scapegoats. Sir Peter tells them to get closer to his old haunts and understand them better. I would tell them to start with their customers.
Banking in partnership
THIS IS the relationship that needs to be thought out. No companies are better placed than the banks to know about their customers — any capable manager with a statement of account in front of him can read the life story it tells. Equally, no com- panies spend more on information technol- ogy. These two streams of information should converge, to give the banks the understanding they need to operate a busi- ness which ought to be a partnership — for banks can only work with their customer's money. If it is, all too often, an uneasy part- nership, with recrimination on both sides, Sir Peter blames the long and bumpy learn- ing process when the banks said goodbye to regulation and hello to competition. He might also blame the violent swings of British economic and monetary policy, though he says that the government was learning, too. The banks have to learn how to use their unique store of information in building up the sense of partnership that should be their defence against the caprices of policy-makers. Having taught their com- puters to write letters, they must teach them to stop writing silly letters (like the mailing shots that bombarded Denis Thatcher at 10 Downing Street) and to stop charging for writing them. Some customers deal with this by not opening them, but they, too, have something to learn.
Paid by committee
A FRIEND of mine quarrelled with his firm, and thought that he might make him- self useful elsewhere as a non-executive director. This is, after all, a growth business — every board is now meant to kit itself out with all sorts of committees, and with non- execs to staff them, as codified by Sir Adri- an Cadbury. Nothing doing, he was told: public companies pick their non-execs from executive directors of other companies, and you, by definition, are not one of them. I advised him to change sex and become a statutory woman, still in strong demand for boardrooms — the same plain faces come round and round. Even so, we can see why all the non-execs assembled in committee do not stop directors' pay from going on and on and up and up, even when results go down and down. (This week's survey from the British Institute of Management tells the familiar story.) A remuneration com- mittee made up of three non-execs who, for the rest of the week, earn executive salaries have a joint and several interest in keeping the general level of boardroom pay up. It is for the owners of the business to enforce proper discipline.
Mirror image
IF ALL the tenants confidently forecast to move into Canary Wharf had got as far as signing up, there would be standing room only, and its bankers could sleep at nights. Latest name on the long list is Mirror Group Newspapers, also in the bankers' hands — synergy, I suppose. If MGN really want to move down river from Holborn, the obvious solution presents itself. MGN should approach the newspaper group now rattling round inside Canary Wharf, and offer a swap.
Cher Jacques.. .
THE annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Develop- ment, in London early next week, will inau- gurate a regime of austerity. Arriving on his personal bicycle, Jacques Attali, the presi- dent, will offer delegates les sandwiches Marmite du chef washed down by le the a l'etuve en tasse plastique. Tours of the build- ing will precede a car-boot sale of its fur- nishings, with special discounts to those shareholders who paid for them. There will be a short business session and a vote of thanks to the auditors. Later, at the Ham- mersmith Palais de Dance . . No, sorry, correction. M. Attali seems to have sacked his spokesperson again, and these state- ments are inoperative. The meeting goes ahead as planned. The host government, with an apt sense of curiosity, is holding its party in the Natural History Museum, the Lord Mayor's is in Vintners Place, the Chancellor's banquet is in Merchant Tay- lors Hall, and the president's banquet is chez soi et chez son chef. Oh, well, it may still work out cheaper to pour drinks down throats in London than to pour money down holes in eastern Europe. When the bank opened in London, two years ago, I warned here that international agencies divided into fattipuffs and thinifers. This one, as I thought, is a fattipuff .
. . . knock, knock
ON THAT occasion (20 April 1991) City & Suburban appeared under my knock-knock headline: `Attali who? Attali and complete- ly over the top.' I quoted it here last week, and found it recycled the following day In the Financial Times's diary column, where it was described as a topical snippet from the vaults of an anonymous commercial bank. That diary has to take its jokes where it can find them, but always likes to change the labels.
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