Do please accept my expressions of sympathy.
No, no, please accept ours
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
0 h, you poor, poor people, how sorry I am for you. I had been rehearsing this line all the way to New York. I grew used to hearing it there in the distant days (well, not so distant as all that) when sterling was a comic currency and the British economy seemed, to American eyes, to be coming apart. Now, I thought, it was my turn. After a tumultuous year and a stormy week in the markets, some of my hosts must have found that the decimal point in their wealth had moved against them. Some expression of sympathy would surely be in order? Not a bit of it. I was back on the receiving end. Oh, you poor people in Britain, how terrible (or so I found myself hearing) this foot-andmouth disease must be. Smoke drifting across a deserted landscape, the countryside closed, the stately homes empty, Stratford on the breadline. . . . The New York Times reported a vexed Tony Blair. Nobody, or so it seemed, had told him what was happening. As soon as he got back from Stockholm, he was going to take personal charge. His style of government began to sound like Harold Wilson's. He popped up again on the front cover of Forbes, along with the cover-line Tony's red tape'. Business in Britain, or so Forbes was saying, had fallen out with his government. For all his professions of friendship, he was entangling the economy in a web of regulation. Perhaps no one has told him about this, either. He might say, or be prompted by his Chancellor to say, that our economy is now an example to others, even though they may not think so. If he does not look out, they will send him a message of sympathy.
Fair weather friend
HE has so far been spared the experience of having the economy go sour on him. Being blown off course, Jim Callaghan would call it. Sudden storms have blown Labour governments in all sorts of unlikely directions, and Conservative oppositions are always tempted to assume that it will happen again. They wait for something to turn down, like the economy. Not this time. Good luck has played its part in that, as luck always does. These have been four years of fair weather for Britain's economy and for the world's, with typhoons in Asia but with the biggest economy of all. the one that makes the weather, basking in a heatwave. Now the weather is changing, and luck, as governments have to learn, is a fair weather friend.
Right first time
ROBERT MAXWELL may be buried in Jerusalem or swimming to Australia but, either way, he will not greatly care what the Department of Trade and Industry's inspectors think of him now. Last time round, when they said he should not be in charge of a public company, he took them to court and established a right to reply to their criticisms before their report was published — a process now known to the lawyers as Maxwellisation. It takes time, it costs money and it somehow leads to leaks, but we should soon learn that the latest inspectors agree with the last ones. The open question is why so many eminent people in and around the City seemed to disagree with them. Some helped him sell shares in Mirror Group Newspapers — a one-eyed Albanian, he said, could see how cheap they were — and some decorated the board. They must have believed that, worldly and capable chaps that they were, they could cope with him. Others were then encouraged to believe this. He had a gift for conjuring up such expensive delusions. A senior banker once told me: 'You'll find that Bob has never let his bankers down.' Bob sensibly left them till last.
Getting sniffy
SOME people are never satisfied. It is just over a year since the Royal Bank of Scotland opened its jaws wide and swallowed the National Westminster. Since then it has been digesting its prey, to such good effect that its share price has doubled. Are the shareholders happy? Not exactly. The pension funds' trade union wants to block the re-election of two of the Royal Bank's directors, whose offence was to approve of a bonus paid, not to them, but to three of their colleagues who got the deal through. The union is sniffy about this, preferring, or so it says, to see organic growth rewarded. It so happens that one of the two directors in the firing line is Sir lain Valiance, better known in his day job as British Telecom's chairman. Organic growth has tended to bypass BT, and in the last year the shares have lost almost two-thirds of their value, but is the union trying to block Sir Iain's reelection to the BT board? Of course not. I would hate to think that these people were looking after my pension.
Beans means claims
DEAR me, what a nasty accident to Claims Direct, the ambulance-chasers — I mean, the personal injury compensation specialists. Perhaps they should sue someone. Their advertising campaign (they spent £19 million last year) has misfired, they expect to report a loss of £20 million, the dividend will be passed and the shares are down to 10p. There have been grumbles from ungrateful customers like Janice Stitt, who, as she told the Sun, was hit in the face by a tin of baked beans. Claims Direct — 'no win, no fee' — pursued a claim for her, but hung on to twothirds of the proceeds. So claiming compensation may not be the sure-fire winner that it looks, either for the amateur, like Mrs Stitt, or the professionals. This is a setback for the compensation culture, where every misfortune must be someone else's fault, but Claims Direct will have to grin and bear it.
A future for claret
I HAVE always hoped that claret had a future, and the Paris Bourse agrees. Winefex is its idea of a new market, which would trade in futures contracts, based on the prices of clarets from 15 of the grandest producers. Wine buyers and speculators could use Winefex to hedge their bets or, of course, to bet more heavily. The difficulty must be to establish what parcel of clarets would constitute good delivery, especially if, as seems likely, the grand producers won't play. Perhaps Winefex could copy other futures markets and devise its own synthetic claret. There's a lot of it about.
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