CITY AND SUBURBAN
The Hon also rises big business where nothing succeeds like successors
CHR I STOPHER FILD ES
Y
ou would expect to find Mitford girls in the Hons' cupboard, but it is not the first place I would look for a captain of indus- try. Some field-marshals of industry now disagree; the captains are their sons. The cupboard (Nancy Mitford described it in The Pursuit of Love) was full of the giggling daughters of noblemen — the Hon. Linda, the Hon. Jassy, even the Hon. Fanny. Their boardroom equivalents are the Hon. Rocco, the Hon. Robert and the Hon. Simon, whose ennobled fathers run Forte, Hanson and the General Electric Company. These Hons are not gigglers. Rocco Forte, whether as chief executive of Forte or as a director of the Savoy (it was a term of the Forte-Savoy armistice) main- tains a lugubrious appearance. Robert Hanson has just graduated to the Hanson board from the corporate finance depart- ment of N. M. Rothschild, where you learn how to keep a straight face. Simon Wein- stock's public appearances are rare. He too served his time in a merchant bank, S. G. Warburg. He was seen the other day at the annual meeting of GEC, when he was re-elected to the board. He is the commer- cial director. His father, Lord (Arnold) Weinstock, has been managing director since the early 1960s, and has for much of the time been the most formidable indus- trialist in this country. He has left the chairmanship to others — as a job for political grandees, or, once, as an incentive in swinging a deal — but no one doubts where, in GEC, power lies. Lord Wein- stock is in his later sixties, and it is now apparent that his own choice of successor would be called Weinstock: the Hon. Simon.
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