MEDIA STUDIES
How, except for the Independent on Sunday and the FT, Mrs Horlick awed the lot of them
STEPHEN GLOVER
It all began quietly enough last Wednes- day when the City pages of all newspapers save the most down-market tabloids report- ed that Mrs Horlick had been suspended. BY Thursday the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express were all run- ning long, gushy features on their news pages enumerating the many remarkable qualities of this hitherto unheard-of woman. She had my immediate sympathies as a single person, albeit a very rich one, pitted against an apparently unfriendly cor- poration. Little did one know that Mrs Horlick's skills as a self-publicist were such that she would quickly turn the tables tri- umphantly on that sleepy giant, Morgan Grenfell.
On Friday morning there was a bit of a lull. It was reported that Mrs Horlick had resigned. The story was generally pushed back to the City pages, though the Daily Telegraph pluckily tried to keep the pot simmering with a piece about 'megabuck mothers'. Mrs Horlick had been in perma- nent conclave with her advisers — the City solicitors Herbert Smith, and a PR man called Anthony Cardew. I had never heard of Mr Cardew but he is reported to be 'at the pinnacle of his craft' and a man of feline gifts who numbers British Aerospace, Eurotunnel and Lonrho among his clients. To the financial hacks whom he habitually attempts to stroke, he is affectionately known as 'the cad'.
Future scholars will have to determine whether Mrs Horlick's next move can be attributed to her own innate brilliance or to the cad's' legendary sense of strategy. On Friday morning she led the journalists out- side her house first to Morgan Grenfell in Finsbury Circus, where she tried but failed to precipitate a show-down with her former bosses, and then to the offices of Deutsche Bank, the parent company, in Frankfurt. She cleverly managed to give the hacks on this bizarre whistle-stop tour the impres- sion that she and they were members of the same socio-economic grouping, informing a hapless security guard that 'if you lay a fin- ger on me or these people, I will call the police'. Later, at Frankfurt airport, she appears to have mislaid her journalistic charges for a few hours, but they do not seem to have borne her any ill-will.
Mrs Horlick's write-up in the following morning's newspapers was everything she must have hoped for. The Daily Mail splashed with the headline 'Superwoman Goes To War'. The Times, even more enthusiastic, covered the top of its front page with photographs of Mrs Horlick above the headline 'City bank superwoman wins the day'. It was not, in fact, altogether clear that she had enjoyed an overwhelm- ing victory, though she certainly asserted that she had. One also couldn't help notic- ing that she sometimes addressed her jour- nalistic camp followers in a rather peremp- tory manner. 'I am going to feed my baby, get changed and then I am going to Mor- gan Grenfell,' she told reporters at the beginning of the day. 'And you are coming with me.' This, too, seems to have occa- sioned no But there is a softer side to Mrs Horlick. During her trip to Germany, and on her return, she continually emphasised her chil- dren. They were ruthlessly used as props in various photo-opportunities: Mrs Horlick with four children in Holland Park; Mrs Horlick wheeling a push-chair; Mrs Hor- lick cradling baby as she gives an interview to a Sunday Telegraph journalist. There is nothing the most gnarled American stump campaigner could teach Mrs Horlick, or indeed 'the cad', about the value of babies when you wish to win over hearts and minds. Her children served to make Mrs Horlick seem sweeter and more human, and to suggest that, for all her hours spent in the City making her millions, she is a wonderful mother.
`I see John Birt is once again the most unpopular man in the BBC.' Sunday's newspapers were designed by Mrs Horlick and 'the cad' to portray her as the soft and vulnerable victim. In one piece she is almost crying. In others she presents herself rather as Orestes might have done after one of his worst nights. This is what she said to the Sunday Telegraph, which devoted the whole of its page three to an interview with Mrs Horlick. 'I've got a big mortgage and kids at school are telling my children,' — note those children again "`Your mum's been sacked."' Morgan Grenfell is depicted as being as arbitrary as indifferent fate. 'How dare they do this? I'm a strong person but I can't take much more. They've deprived me of the job I wanted.'
And so Mrs Horlick has been allowed to tell her story in her own way and on her own terms. In no interview was she subject- ed to any very tough questioning. She was not required to give an account — or at any rate she did not supply one — as to why Morgan Grenfell believed that she had been trying secretly to lure senior col- leagues to work at another merchant bank. There were a very few sceptical voices in the press but, with one or two honourable exceptions such as the Independent on Sun- day, these tended to be confined to the City pages. The Financial Times, being more concerned with the financial ramifications of the case than the details of Mrs Horlick's personal life, offered a more balanced account. The down-market tabloids ignored the story entirely, believing that their read- ers were more interested in the misbe- haviour of another spoilt millionaire, the Radio 1 disc jockey, Chris Evans.
I'm not sure where Nicola Horlick's clever manipulation of the press will lead her. It certainly seems rather unlikely that she will get her job back, or that she will have endeared herself very greatly to other prospective employers. But perhaps that was not her purpose. It seems that she wished to present herself in the best possi- ble light, to be seen to be in the right even if she was not, and in this supreme cause she was prepared to apply the PR tricks that she had learnt in the City. In this sense she seems admirably qualified to pursue the career which she has confided to the Express on Sunday is her greatest ambition — to become a Labour MP. So far as I am concerned, that would constitute the best reason imaginable for never voting for that party.
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