CITY AND SUBURBAN
Make the world a level playing-field help stamp out summits
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Iwould not like to have the job of wash- ing John Major's shirts. Nothing personal, but he must tip them out of his bag when he gets back from the Copenhagen summit, and demand a quick turnaround before he goes off to the summit in Tokyo. Socks, too, come to think of it. He could do him- self and his shirts and the rest of us a favour by demanding a climb-down from summits. The European versions are like half-yearly board meetings, with a distract- ed and divided troupe of non-execs invari- ably outwitted by an empire-building man- agement. They are made worse by the cus- tom that rotates meetings around the direc- tors' countries, so that each host feels the urge to cut a dash and take an initiative, whether the company needs one or not. Thus it can now expect to find itself with a banking subsidiary, getting ready to design its own Ecu notes and to ask the board for powers to force them on the customers. This, it will explain, is all part of the com- pany mission statement, and as a high-level job creation scheme has the enthusiastic support of those who stand to gain from it. Even the weariest board meeting winds somewhere safe to sea, but as for the annu- al meeting coming up in Tokyo, I see no reason why it should ever start or ever stop. The minutes are just about written by now (thanks to the sherpas who make a good thing out of summitry) and the economic time will be told by the usual stopped clock. Even as a chance for the host government to show off, it has been overtaken by an unexpected outbreak of democracy.
Getting shirty
I REFLECT wearily that these meetings started as a stunt, put on by the French, copied next year by the forgettable Presi- dent Ford, and becoming an instant tradi- tion. In the same way, the Group of Seven finance ministers' meetings, now as littered with superfluous sherpas as the south col of Everest, began as a round of drinks in the White House library. The Governor of the Bank of England, who has had to sit through ten years of these meetings, con- cludes that they were better when they started — small informal meetings work well, he says, large set-piece gatherings don't. Then the set pieces become regular formal events, and the fixers have to find somewhere else for a drink and a horse-
trade. It may be, of course, that the Prime Minister plans to stop over in Hong Kong and have some shirts made — or it may be that Mrs Major, like the wife of a well- known New York banker, saves up all his dirty shirts for his business trips and makes him put them through the hotel laundry. Tokyo still seems a long way to go for a clean shirt. If the Prime Minister will say so, I shall offer him associate membership of my City body, NABC, which stands for Not Another Bloody Committee. He can start NABSummit.
Man of Kent
NOW Robin Leigh-Pemberton will be spending more time with his railway. It runs (steam-hauled, of course) through his grounds at Torry Hill in Kent, and will now get the care and maintenance it needs. Near it is the tree-stump where an estate worker once came across a cordless tele- phone, furiously quacking: 'It's Nigel Law- son speaking — put me through to the Governor.' I don't know about that, sir, I just found this thing 'ere.' Governors need to be blessed with a sense of proportion. This one came in on a sticky wicket. Mar- garet Thatcher was suspicious of the Bank, on stiff terms with its Governor and no terms with his Deputy, who thought that her Medium Term Financial Strategy was a snake-oil remedy and said so. She seized the chance to make an appointment of her own — someone who, she thought, would be there to stand up for the right even if the election went wrong. That piece of casting was no help to Robin Leigh-Pemberton. He was caricatured as an unqualified political placeman, Downing Street's man in Threadneedle Street. He refuted that in action. His legacy as Governor has been to move the Bank towards independence. For- mer Chancellors now fall over each other to say that the nation's credit would stand far more highly if he and not they were in charge. That is the best and least-sought compliment to a Governor who will now be happy to spend more time on his other job, as Lord Lieutenant of Kent.
Fixed but adjustable
TEXANS at the United States Treasury have a ten-gallon-hatted style of their own. Before Lloyd Bentsen and James Baker came John Connally, who rode through Dallas with John Kennedy and has taken fragments of the bullet to his grave. He endeared himself to me, though not to the International Monetary Fund, by calling it a museum where everything that was not already stuffed ought to be. Norman Lam- ont could have learned from him. 'I want to make it abundantly clear,' Connally told a bankers' conference, 'that we are not going to devalue. . . ' Paul Volcker at his elbow thought this rash, rightly suspecting (this was 1971) that the dollar would have to be devalued soon. Connally set his mind at rest: 'That's my unalterable position today. I don't know what it will be this summer.'
Ins and outs of Lloyd's
THE BAD news for Lloyd's of London is the headline figure — a loss of almost £3 billion, which must surely, this time round, include the kitchen sink. The good news is the flurry of new companies and partner- ships which are trying to put money into Lloyd's. As the names retire, hurt, to sell their Old Rectories, the professional money managers prepare to move in, and propositions whiz around the City. It con- firms my view that beneath those banner headlines and inside that silly building, a good business is trying to get out.
Crescendo
CREATIVE SPONSORSHIP by the Mid- land Bank. With an eye to the goings-on at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Midland's splendid Proms week at Covent Garden features a powerful drama of intrigue, betrayal, deca- dence, ambition and an autocratic hero brought down by a woman's vengeance. It is called Attila, which is either a coincidence or a misprint.
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