The Branded Gentry E-Book

Charles Vallance

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 510

Beschreibung

Every era has its gentry: wealth, authority and power are seldom static for long. Once, whiskered industrialists challenged the landed gentry for social ascendancy. Then, in the twentieth century, came a new era of entrepreneurs, who made their names by making their names into brands. This is a book about thirteen such individuals; from Johnnie Boden to Julian Richer; from Lord Sainsbury to Paul Smith; from Emma Bridgewater and John Hegarty to Robert Hiscox and others. Remarkable men and women, from a sweeping range of industries: pioneers of modern enterprise. The authors take us on a colourful, illuminating journey, described through thirteen compelling portraits, covering grand philosophies and shrewd strategies, the lessons of success (and failure) and the dramas and difficulties on the way. The book will appeal to general readers interested in finding out more about the people behind the brands, as well as those of an entrepreneurial spirit who want to know how others got to the top. And what is involved when you have your name above the door.

Leseprobe

THE BRANDED GENTRY

THE BRANDED GENTRY

HOW A NEW ERA OF ENTREPRENEURS MADE THEIR NAMES

CHARLES VALLANCE & DAVID HOPPER

Photographic credits:

Author photos reproduced by permission of Dan Burn-Forti; Lord Bell, courtesy of Campaign/Haymarket Media Group; Emma Bridgewater, by Ari Ashley, reproduced by permission of company; Jackie Cooper reproduced by permission of company; Sir James Dyson reproduced by permission of company; Sir John Hegarty reproduced by permission of company; Robert Hiscox reproduced by permission of the subject; David Linley reproduced by permission of company; Tony Laithwaite, by Yves Gellie, reproduced by permission of company; Julian Richer reproduced by permission of the subject; Lord Sainsbury reproduced by permission of the subject; Sir Paul Smith reproduced by permission of company; Jonathan Warburton reproduced by permission of company.

First published 2013 by Elliott and Thompson Limited

27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX

www.eandtbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-908739-78-0

Text © David Hopper and Charles Vallance 2013

The Authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the UK by T. J. International Ltd., Padstow

Typeset by Grade Design and Marie Doherty

To our families

Irina, Miky, and Evgenya Karen, Louise, and Will

CONTENTS

Introduction

Prologue: Eponymous beginnings

1. LORD BELL OF BELGRAVIA

2. JOHNNIE BODEN

3. EMMA BRIDGEWATER

4. JACKIE COOPER

5. SIR JAMES DYSON

6. SIR JOHN HEGARTY

7. ROBERT HISCOX

8. TONY LAITHWAITE

9. DAVID ARMSTRONG-JONES, VISCOUNT LINLEY

10. JULIAN RICHER

11. LORD SAINSBURY OF PRESTON CANDOVER, KG

12. SIR PAUL SMITH

13. JONATHAN WARBURTON

Epilogue: What’s in a name?

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

Every era, every society has its gentry and ruling elite. Wealth, authority, and power are seldom static for long. Dynasties come and go, political systems rise and fall. Money changes hands in new ways.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, heavily whiskered industrialists challenged the landed gentry for social ascendancy. Financial mobility had arrived and was accelerating.

Later in the nineteenth century and through the course of the twentieth century, the advent of consumer markets saw commerce evolve further. A new era of entrepreneurs put their name to a new model of wealth creation. And they did so literally. This was the era of Mr Cadbury, Mr Sainsbury, Mr Marks, Mr Spencer, Mr Lewis, Mr Boots, Mr Walker, Mr Sharwood, Mr Warburton, Mr Lipton, and Mr Tetley.

This is a book about men and women such as these who have succeeded in becoming an eponymous aristocracy. Who aren’t known by the name of the land they own, but by the name of the brand they have become. Who have made their name by making their name into a brand.

This is a book about the Branded Gentry.

‘I’ve never lived in a building without my name on it.’

IVANKA TRUMP

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PROLOGUE

Eponymous beginnings

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DAVID HOPPER: I grew up facing a line of eponymous brands. The front windows of our terraced house looked out across a busy road onto a row of shops called ‘Moore’s’ (the butcher), ‘Gray’s’ (the baker), and ‘Gallon’s Grocery’ (the grocer, obviously, but he probably did have some candles somewhere). The effect was spoiled by the bookends: on one side, a fish and chip shop calling itself ‘Fish & Chips’; and on the other, a similarly imaginative chemist (‘Chemist’), but at least there was symmetry.

Not that I knew what eponymous meant. And a brand was something that the black-and-white television cowboys burned into their grey cattle. It never occurred to me that there was actually a real person called Moore, Gray or Gallon, let alone a real removal man called Pickford, or a pair of shoemaking brothers called Clark, or that somewhere on earth there was actually a real engineer named Frank Hornby living the dream, making model train sets.

The proud Yorkshire city in which I grew up was not in thrall to retail science as are the identikit shopper-villages of today. Then, you either took it or you left it, and people then were happy to take it, clag-black buildings and lard-grease cafes and all. Early sixties existence, like the television of the day, was pre-colour and enjoyed plenty of time not being open for business. No one suspected that the retail future – and life itself – would end up at the other extreme of digital, 24–7 uniformity. West End marketing gurus, talking of attention spans and brand modelling, were twenty years away at least. In those slower days, shop-window crypts would stay sealed up and airless from one month to the next, and many of the signs and logos above the shops and factories had been in place for decades.

Many of these signs were the hallmarks of their eponymous owners, with toil and history in the lettering. Proud, unselfconscious names, with tough, stocky vowels reflecting the dispositions of their founders, and thick-boned consonants supporting each other like the girders of railway bridges: Hammond’s, Harrison’s, Hepworth’s, Warburton’s, Whittaker’s, Ramsbottom’s, Booth’s, Leadbetter’s, Crawshaw’s, Collinson’s, Redfern’s, Shaw’s, Duckworth’s, Duckham’s, Looker’s, Crofts, Jowett, Seebrook’s (a fortuitous spelling error by the crisp company’s clerk, who should have written the more insipid ‘C. Brook’s’), Arnold Laver’s, Wallace Arnold, Samuel Ledgard…

Behind these names were the gentry of the industrial era, who were part of an historical transition of wealth going back centuries – from men who represented God to men who exploited the land, to men who used motive power, and which would soon be on the move again to men and women who knew how to communicate ideas.

But the question for now was this one: Who were the men (and they would almost always be men) who had got to the point where their very names now graced the buildings and shopfronts between which lesser people walked? I’d never actually asked that question, yet one summer I got to find out its answer.

During the long school recess of 1973, I blagged a labouring job at a garage called L. G. Mason (Bradford) Ltd, working on the forecourt, serving petrol (3 gallons for £1), checking tyres and oil, and washing the used cars on sale. Once a week, Mr Mason himself (in those days, important people and teachers did not have Christian names) would arrive in his Rolls Royce, and hand over the keys for us to valet the car.

This was my first interaction with a member of the entrepreneurial class of that era. Here was a West Riding business magnate who spent a lot of his day at mellow-voiced meetings with his kind, where he would drink fine brown liquids, suck on his brown pipe, and talk of his twoitemed garage empire. It was the first time I’d come across an actual (as opposed to television) owner of a Rolls Royce; albeit a fading vehicle that had, by then, given over most of its molecular structure to Virginia Flake Cut tobacco. The floor mats and carpets were originals, curling at the edges and tinged with, and smelling warmly of, rust and grit and more tobacco (with some comforting lower notes of wet dog in there as well). Here then was a member of the Yorkshire industrial elite with a business named after him: that name (plus a reference to the beloved home city, there in brackets) appeared in large letters above the forecourt and on the stickers in the back windows of the pre-rusted, every-car-a-Friday-car vehicles that we sold.

My next student holiday job, in 1976, took me to another eponymous brand. But this time, it was owned by a different kind of founding family who would eventually take their name way beyond the streets of a hilly Yorkshire town. Wm Morrison was as Bradford a firm as you could get, having set up a stall in Rawson Market before the turn of the twentieth century, and always preserving a native empathy with the locals who regarded Leeds, a mere 9 miles away, as trumped-up (so you can imagine what they thought of the south). But in 1961, Morrison had opened up something new, called a supermarket – a shop where you picked up the goods yourself, put them in a basket, and paid for the whole lot all at once before exiting.

Mr Mason had been a Rolls Royce man, who lived within the status quo of the Northern industrial aristocracy; but the Morrison family, despite all their authentic Bradfordian provenance, were pioneers, with an altogether more radical perspective of the world – and they ran German Mercs.

My dad had seen an ad in the Telegraph & Argus asking for someone to clean the management cars at the Thornton Road headquarters. I had, shall we say, the relevant credentials and they gave me the job. There were about twenty motley cars in the fleet – Marinas, Hunters, Cortinas, Dolomites – because by that time the reps were travelling all over West Yorkshire and beyond. Ken Morrison had a large Mercedes 280SE, with its own private plate, and I knew something unconventional was going on here because the ashtrays were unused.

My cleaning den ran alongside the supermarket, with the managers’ offices next door in Hilmore House (another eponym, based on Ken’s wife Hilda), giving me plenty of time to witness the forward-looking nature of this burgeoning retail enterprise. The store paraphernalia would change not every decade but every week. Signs were made not of steel and wood but of paper and plastic. Speed of service, stock management, and volume of footfall were the new indicators of success. Moore’s Butcher, Gray’s Baker or Gallon’s Grocer, this was not. Nor was it Mr Mason and his brace of garages. No, this was something of greater scale.

Wm Morrison was a retail brand that had its sights set on a future of fmcg (fast-moving consumer goods) transience. Richard Branson’s Virgin Records had already upset the music industry apple cart, and Freddie Laker’s planes were offering cheap flights to the US. The next phase of wealth creation was replacing the last. Out with the old; in with the new. By 1978, my old employer, L. G. Mason (Bradford) Ltd, would have closed down, but by 2011, Morrisons (the name having taken on the plural) would have 455 UK stores.

There was a tailwind for this change. In London, a small woman with a (to the Northern working-class ear) ridiculously supercilious voice (she had not been gravel-effect voice-coached at that stage) was on the move into Downing Street. Jim Callaghan had been slapping her down in the Commons, but as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher would over time neuter the trade union politbureau – Scargill, Jones, Scanlon, Feather, et al – and thereby indirectly recraft the ground rules on which new businesses, big and small, could be launched. In the next decade, the face of industrial relations, the economy, and, of course, advertising and marketing, would change beyond recognition.

Eventually, with help from the internet revolution, these new trading conditions would open up opportunities for anyone, at least in theory, to launch their own brand, using their own name if they were minded to. Britain would, in due course, become pre-eminent in brand engineering and self-starter entrepreneurship, due in part to the shrill, newbie Conservative PM and daughter of Alfred Roberts, owner of an eponymous Grantham grocery brand.

The position of Thatcher’s PR advisor would be taken by Tim Bell, in later years heading the Bell Pottinger agency. As part of the newly empowered entrepreneurial class, there was emerging a whole new support industry based on the ‘gatekeepers’: eponymous companies in their own right, none more famous than Saatchi & Saatchi, comprising brand Merlins who knew the alchemy needed to turn a word or name into fame and money. A whole new tier of wealth was coming into being (much of it located in the erstwhile porno-land of Soho in London). The owners of these communications agencies (BBH, DMB&B, CDP, BMP, DDB, TBWA – companies that used their initials like bullets) would themselves become branded gentry; kingmakers becoming kings (and queens, of course). It is appropriate, then, that a proportion of this book be given over to these pioneers; these gatekeeper-wizards, such as Bell, Hegarty, and Cooper.

There are numerous books that examine what it takes to make a successful brand, and, indeed, how success can be defined. But what, we ask, is the importance of having one’s name over the shop or on the side of the truck or in the hands of the millions who are buying your goods? Does proprietorial nomenclature define the brand, or does the brand maketh the proprietor?

We thought that, by interviewing a selection of the brand-owning gentry of this country, we might get to understand more about what this means and duly reach some useful conclusions about the nature of success in the eponymous brand universe.

Of course, things used to change over hundreds of years and now they change in real time or in no time at all. Looking around, it’s possible to wonder if eponyms have already had their day, to be superseded by brands that are named after fruits and baby noises. Are they set to go the way of Mr L. G. Mason of Bradford? Whatever the case, the extraordinary people of our book might, we thought, have some extraordinary lessons for us, in terms of their creativity, enterprise, endeavour, imagination, and guile.

Media and commerce have made the world smaller, and these people have contributed to the shrinkage. It seems to shrink as we get older too, as time connects things up. Things have a habit of coming full circle, so that one minute you’re cleaning their cars, and in the next forty-year-blink of an eye, you’re writing a book about them. In the spirit of such ruminations, here is one last anecdote from my Bradford childhood, from I guess around 1963. I am with my mother buying a round-pin plug and some fuse wire from the main town-centre electrical store on Market Street. It is a biggish store, with cotton-bagged Hoovers and hardwood valve-driven television sets, and has a large sign over a sixties techno-modernist window display. It is another eponymous brand, and it is called Vallances. And half a century later, one son of that named family business – an eponymous ad agency gatekeeper himself – has co-authored this book.

CHARLES VALLANCE: Unlike David’s, my father wasn’t a miner. He and my uncle had taken over the family business from my grandfather in the sixties and proved to be a formidable team. My Uncle Martin fronted the TV ads and my dad quietly terrified everyone behind the scenes, nailing down costs with a ferocity that only a Yorkshireman (or, I concede, a Scotsman) can muster. Over a twenty-year span, the Vallance brothers built an empire of shops that bestrode the Yorkshire Ridings like an electrical retailing colossus. From the spa town of Harrogate in the north to the steel town of Sheffield in the south, from Ilkley’s western moors to the eastern shores of Hull and most towns in between, you’d find a Vallances. With hindsight, being part of a family of moderately successful north-eastern electrical retailers might not sound too grand, but it felt quite grand at the time.

This was perhaps one of the reasons my bedroom window didn’t look out over the local butcher and baker. Instead it looked out on to the leafy undulations of Gledhow Wood, with the view extending to a tree-tipped horizon where the distant backsides of the houses on Potternewton Lane were visible in winter. (Even my home was eponymous: The Homestead, 136 Gledhow Wood Road, Leeds 8.) From this vantage point there were no shops to be seen. The nearest parade involved a brisk five-minute walk along our road and then left onto Thorn Lane. I remember the journey vividly, right down to where the greatest risk of treading on a dog turd lay. (By the gatehouse to Gledhow Wood, if you’re wondering. I’m afraid our dog Hughie was a frequent contributor.)

I remember it so vividly because this was the route to Rainer’s, the local sweet shop and newsagent. Every Saturday morning, my sister, brother, and I would make our pilgrimage there, collectively enriching Mr Rainer to the tune of about 30p. Mind you, 10p each went a long way then. Three foamy prawns cost 1p; a sherbet dip was 2½p (as was a second-class stamp, as it happens). Fruit salads and Black Jacks came in at four to a penny, and 5p bought an almost infinite supply of Parma violets. Loose pineapple chunks also represented tremendous value if you were looking to bulk out your purchase.

Until I started moving up to the pricier world of Marathons, Topics, and Picnics, I never really encountered anything that might be described as a brand in the advertising sense of the word. What Kate, James, and I had bought, clutched tightly in our hands in a white paper bag, were more of a sugared commodity which, we assumed, had always been around and would always be around. Like sugar, only more interesting. Mr Rainer sold his sweet shop to a chain of bookmakers when I was ten.

At home, the brandscape was rather different. Being of electrical retailing stock, a constant stream of new devices and contraptions washed in over the threshold, some of them British, some of them European. But all the really cool ones were Japanese. In particular, I remember an extraordinary Sony music centre, which was so sleek, silvery, and futuristic, it looked as if it couldn’t have been invented yet. In an era when television sets were still frequently concealed behind faux mahogany, it flagrantly broke every rule of front-room decorum; a massive, mildly menacing slab of techno-ostentation. With a smoked-glass top and a cassette tray that eased gracefully forward out of nowhere, it sat there like an alien spacecraft looming superciliously over a lesser civilisation. Not that I am disparaging any of my mum’s décor.

In time, I was old enough to have holiday jobs in my dad’s shops. I should also say my uncle’s shops, but at the time I gave my dad all the credit, despite Uncle Martin looming out of the pages of the Yorkshire Post or interrupting Richard Whiteley in YTV’s ad breaks. Sorry, Uncle Martin. What a lot of branded kit there was. From the humble Pye and ITT, to the mid-market Philips, Hitachi, and Ferguson, to the upper echelons of Toshiba, Panasonic (Quintrix), and the peerless Sony (Trinitron), not to mention the faintly regal Dynatron which the old ladies loved and wouldn’t hear a word against. Nor would I, much to the ridicule of Keith, assistant manager of our Corn Exchange shop on Briggate, one of the less salubrious streets on the Leeds shopping scene. It was two doors down from a nightclub called Jacomelli’s, and those two doors were boarded up. I’m trying to be romantic about life as a trainee electrical retailer in the wrong part of Leeds in the seventies. But the truth be known, it wasn’t entirely glamorous (barring the odd trip to Cecil Gee’s).

As one spell of holiday work gave way to another, it has to be said that the tide seemed to be turning against Vallances. Specialist shops like HMV made us give up on record sales, while a new kind of discount retailer leveraging greater economies of scale made life difficult for a salesman trying to sell the same Sony for £5 more, even though at Vallances it came with a plug (I know, because I screwed most of them on) and more knowledgeable staff (by which I mean Keith, not me, because I was screwing the plugs on in the storeroom).

Customer service was a byword at Vallances, summed up in the magnificently terse mission statement: ‘Our aim is to give 100% customer satisfaction, not dividends to shareholders or jobs to employees.’ Motivational stuff, but I’m afraid not motivational enough. In 1987, the brothers bowed to the inevitable and sold out to Thorn EMI. The shops were absorbed into the Rumbelows chain, which shut down soon afterwards, but not before dad and Martin had made their fortune. These days, EMI is not doing too well either; nor is HMV. Sometimes you have to know when to get out. Especially in the electrical retail game.

In addition to making dad and Martin a tidy sum, the sale of Vallances had another obvious consequence. It closed the door to any of the children following in their father’s footsteps (on the arguable assumption that any of us would have been invited to do so).

So Vallances ended after two generations and never needed the services of the founder’s grandchildren. In the course of writing this book, we’ve been lucky enough to interview representatives from brand dynasties that go back one generation in the case of James Dyson, and considerably further back to a great-great-grandfather in the case of Jonathan Warburton. I won’t pre-empt their chapters by saying too much about what we learnt from them as individuals, but one piece of combined learning is very clear: contrary to what you might expect, those who inherit a brand legacy can be just as fanatical as those who start one. They too have something to prove and to live up to, and perhaps even more of an ethos to uphold.

I was studying English at Nottingham University when Vallances was sold. It’s fair to say that this was not an obvious degree choice if I was looking to join the family business, and I certainly had no imminent intention of asking for a job. That said, the sale did come out of the blue, and I do remember the vague feeling of a distant door shutting on my future employment options (not to mention my plug-screwing prowess).

The mid-to-late eighties was a time of relative prosperity and high employment. Unlike today, students didn’t think much about what they would be doing after university. Or, at least, this one didn’t. There was an assumption that something would come up. Probably in London. And so it was, shortly after my finals, that I found myself writing letters to advertising agencies asking if I could have an interview. I even went so far as to buy myself a shirt at Paul Smith’s fantastically cool shop on Byard Lane, about which we will have plenty to say in that particular chapter. I may have got the shirt right, but I had got the timing horribly wrong, having missed the ‘milk round’ which had happened a full nine months earlier. Quite a few of the agencies to whom I wrote were quick to point this out. Nonetheless I ploughed on, buying the odd copy of Campaign to keep me informed about what was happening in adland.

I managed to get an interview at BMP (Boase Massimi Pollitt), Zetland Advertising, and Saatchi & Saatchi. At this last agency, the man who interviewed me (and whose name I have shamefully forgotten) obviously thought I had potential as an account planner, but not as an account manager (which is the role I was convinced I was cut out for – I was wearing a Paul Smith shirt after all). He was utterly right and I was utterly wrong. Despite him organising an interview with their planning director, I declined the invitation. I even went so far as to write him a letter describing his refusal to take me on as an account man as ‘the worst mistake you’ve ever made in my life’. No wonder I was struggling to get a job.

After a brief stint at Colman RSCG, I found my first proper agency home at Burkitt Weinreich Bryant, where I spent three glorious years, learning roughly half of what I know about advertising in that duration. I then selfishly left to further my career, having received an offer that, back in the eighties, you couldn’t refuse. The offer was to work for an agency called Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Normally in advertising, four or five agencies are in the ascendancy at any one time. For most of the eighties there was only one. BBH was, quite simply, the best at everything. With the best accounts, the best people, the best ads and, frankly, the prettiest girls. My time at BBH, therefore, completed the other half of my advertising apprenticeship. Although John Hegarty has become by some margin the most famous of the three founders, I learnt equally from John (Bartle), Nigel (Bogle), and John (Hegarty) when I was there.

After BBH, I went to an agency called WCRS where I would probably still be working but for a few ups and downs to do with succession management. As it was, I decided to look around and, in the process, was presented with an opportunity to start my own agency with three marvellous individuals called Rooney Carruthers, Adrian Coleman, and Ian Priest. So it was that I became (albeit only a quarter) eponymous in a company called Vallance, Carruthers, Coleman, Priest which, for obvious reasons, is generally shortened to VCCP. Our founding client was and is O2, to whom we remain eternally grateful and which launched on 02.02.02, about a month after the agency started. It was a busy January. But not for me, because I was on gardening leave.

Ten years later, I have had the pleasure of working on a number of different accounts. In the strange overlapping way of things, three of those accounts were Dyson, Hiscox, and Laithwaite’s – so I had got to know a little about three more of our interviewees before I asked them to participate in this book.

Which brings me to the topic in hand. Wherever you go in Britain, you will be near the birthplace of an eponymous brand. Some of them made it big, some of them didn’t, some of them never wanted to. Some of them survive and some of them don’t. From brewers to shopkeepers, chemists to confectioners, the names are part of our tradition. But it may be a tradition that is dying out. The new generations of brand builders favour a different approach, keeping their name one stage removed from the businesses they create. Pret a Manger, Virgin, Innocent, Carphone Warehouse (not to mention Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) are shining examples of the new paradigm. While these founders may be synonymous with their brands, they are not eponymous.

Just in case they had some wisdom to impart, we thought we’d talk to some of the eponyms while they’re still around.

OUR APPROACH: Think what it was like to be in their shoes. Being invited to an interview where you will be asked about the magic ingredients of your personal success is at best a mixed blessing, only made worse if the interviewers have a fascination with your name.

Being in the public eye is not quite the dream it’s cracked up to be. You may have the money to spend, but the fun fades if the media are likely to turn up in your dustbin sifting through to check what you’ve spent it on. No nation envies success quite so much as the British, nor takes such a coprophagous pleasure in its reversal. In these circumstances, it is not surprising if paranoia or lack of trust eats away at the very optimism and determination that were factors in your success in the first place. You may increasingly feel that anyone new you meet has to be vetted (at least in your mind; perhaps by your professional handlers) for motives and intentions best not taken at face value. It’s a slightly sad process that can leave some in the public eye forever untrusting and emotionally desensitised. Indeed, as an interviewer, one can spot straight away the vacant PR-prepped gaze and bulletproof cataracts grown from years of hurt from prurient journalists, unhinged web-gossip, and honeytrap assassins.

So you have to admire those who manage to preserve their inner humanity, and especially our willing subjects here. Most of them can still walk out of their front door without being recognised or having to sidestep the paparazzi. But they are still in the public eye, and it was refreshing the way they gave of themselves here.

Our original (‘ideal’) list of participants was not so different from the one that appears in the following pages. Inevitably, there were those who refused our requests, for a variety of reasons – some understandable, some less so. In one or two cases, we were unable to penetrate a one-mile-thick protective polystyrene doughnut. But such cases were few, and that’s football for you.

In most of the cases where people agreed, there wasn’t much in the way of neurosis from PR and PA intermediaries, and in fact we were more often buoyed by the interest and enthusiasm shown by the subjects in the project. Most welcomed the opportunity to pass on their life experiences and insights. And whether their motive was to encourage others, to have some fun, to generate some publicity, to indulge an ego, or just to enjoy a moment of therapy – or all of these – we didn’t mind, because their tales were so worth telling. If, for their part of the bargain, it involved a leap of faith (over our abilities and our motives as the writers), our final subjects presumably felt that this was a good moment to make it, and we were grateful to them for doing so.

Which begs the question of why we chose these particular people in the first place. Coming up with a provisional list that we thought might bring the idea to life in an interesting and compelling way was actually quite easy. Our aim was to get a variety of characters and industries and hope that, within these, there would emerge other varieties, such as in personalities and routes to success. Some people were obviously important to such a subject matter; others were at a stage in their journeys that made them especially interesting.

From the start, we felt the book should be based on a ‘live’ interviewing process – and on what we hoped would be the unique insights that come directly from conversations – rather than on desk research, which would, we feared, be going over ground already well covered by other material. In the chapters that follow, large portions of text are direct quotations (edited as sensitively as possible to take out interruptions, ruminative pauses and digressions, coughing fits, and excessive blasphemy), which, we felt, would make for the most representative and most interesting approach. Most of our interviewees are well-publicised individuals (to varying degrees), and in most cases, it is straightforward to find articles about them through a few minutes on Google. But we wanted to depict the true colour and texture of entrepreneurial success – in a way that could only be achieved by our actually meeting the-people-with-the-names. To shake their hands and look into their eyes, as it were.

Here, then, is what we found.

‘Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.’

RONALD REAGAN

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CHAPTER

LORD BELL OF BELGRAVIA

(Bell Pottinger)

INTERVIEWED 21 DECEMBER 2011

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Curzon Street, Mayfair: home to peers, embassies, oil oligarchs, expensive escort girls; houses with high drawing-room ceilings behind wide black doors; high-end stationery boutiques, Victorian pubs, government offices, and British secret services, where Eton-educated spies once used to offer each other cigarettes during gentlemanly Tinker Tailor interrogation interviews.

At number 14, Lord Bell is chain-smoking. He does it in the uninhibited 1950s Mad Men way that you don’t see anymore, and which deserves proper cigarettes with woodpeckers and sailors on the pack, not the low-nicotine-bandwidth Benson & Hedges Golds piled on his table. The man we are about to interview is rueful about the ‘improvements’ brought by the post-internet era – to the point of having only recently replaced his fifteen-year-old Scotch-taped Nokia.

Lord Bell – Timothy John Leigh Bell, Baron Bell of Belgravia (‘call me Tim’) – is the eponymous co-founder of Bell Pottinger, one of the most famous of global public relations companies, recently the subject of a management buyout (from the parent company, Chime) reported to be in the order of £20 million. The industry’s growth has been driven, in part, by the expanding pressures of a media that individuals and companies cannot possibly handle on their own, and by a corporate perception that ‘managed publicity’ can sometimes offer better value than conventional advertising. Company, country, or rock chick – it seems everyone in the media eye now needs a PR agent.

The image of the PR man can be unflattering, be it one of sitcom buffoonery or ‘spin doctors’ disguising political malfeasance as benevolence. It’s a job that has evolved with the Westminster landscape, from the bulldog Bernard Ingham (one-time Chief Press Secretary to Margaret Thatcher) to the terrier Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy, who became known as ‘the real deputy prime minister’). And somewhere in between these two differing styles is where we find Tim Bell – a man who never actually had a formal role as a government ‘press secretary’, but who was widely seen as the brains behind Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 – and many of her successes after that. He is regarded (to his chagrin, whether it is true or not) as being responsible for coaching her voice down an octave and pulling the plug on the electric-shock perm.

Bell Pottinger shares its foyer with an entrance to Benugo cafe bar – a not-quite-comfortable concession to the practicalities of the modern era, whereby, if you say you want a coffee when you arrive, the receptionists totter next door and buy you one, corrugated cup-holder and all. Bell’s office is five floors up, and when we meet him, he has been occupied for several days marshalling the company’s own PR firefight, following a newspaper sting operation. The company has broken the first rule of public relations consultants, which is never to become the story, and Bell himself has been drawing flak and facing the vitriol of one newspaper in particular.

It is hard not to begin the interview by coming straight to this issue, and it is obvious that he is irritated – not so much by what they’re saying about him (which he sees as going with the territory), more about what he feels is another example of the political media losing its ‘reasonableness’.

To illustrate the point, he shows a picture of an internet-inspired mob, holding banners on which names of arbitrarily chosen public hate figures have been scrawled in blood-red paint; barely known figures who have been unfortunate enough to momentarily transgress political correctness and now have a demented street mob demanding their heads be put on poles. ‘We’ve lost balance… common sense…’ he muses. ‘Mad ideas are now able to move far quicker than steady judgement. It’s mad.’ He feels that the press, rather than calm the waters, like to shark-feed on this kind of thing. Whatever happens after the Leveson Inquiry, there is, he feels, no self-motivated check on press hypocrisy any more; only a relentless Glenda Slagg chutzpah, condemning something one minute, while exploiting it in the very next column.

Bell does, however, have his own version of inconsistency, and gauging his mood can be treacherous. He’s the pessimist one minute, the optimist the next. At one point, he tries to resolve his indecision in front of us, concluding, after a slightly magnificent pause (during which it’s hard to tell whether he is unable to decide or is just being Shakespearean), that his optimistic side shall today be the more persuasive.

Actually, I have taken the trouble to try and deal with the pessimism. I have a mantra which I’ve developed in the last few years, which is to take care of yourself, mentally, emotionally, in health and in spirituality.

Give or take the occasional sprint relay of cigarette smoking, of course. It suggests that the man is not so much a wavering optimist as a walking paradox – it being a miracle that this particular paradox is still walking at all.

I’ve had a cancer operation on my colon, the top layer of my left lung removed because of latent tuberculosis, and my gall bladder taken out. That was a direct result of all the chemotherapy and radiotherapy after the cancer operation. I’ve also had a triple heart bypass. The majority of what happened to me physically is my own fault because I lived a certain lifestyle and was careless. I’m aware of every piece of information about smoking because one of the first clients Saatchi & Saatchi had was the Health Education Council with the anti-smoking campaign, so I’ve studied all that stuff and, if I’m honest, I prefer to think it happens to other people, not me. That’s the normal human attitude, but it can oddly be quite helpful, because it means you’re prepared to put yourself in harm’s way, and by doing that you become stronger. You take risks. You stare it in the face.

Then a quick mood-swing to penitence:

But every now and then, the world kicks me and when the world kicks me, fuck it hurts. And I sit down and I think, ‘You fucking asked for it. Serves you right.’

His reputation for recklessness certainly precedes him. In his early days at Saatchi & Saatchi, he had ordered a Ferrari before most directors had got desks, but he justified this by saying he needed to show clients, if they ever rejected the agency’s work, that the company still had the upper hand. ‘They have their Vauxhalls; I have my Ferrari.’

Then there is the story that one time, after having had major surgery, he discharged himself from hospital against all sensible medical advice, just so he could attend dinner with the Sultan of Brunei. Which is either insane or inspired, depending on your view of risk. He says he can’t remember if this tale is true or not: in his time, he’s had a lot of surgery, and more dinners with plutocratic sultans than most people have had with their TVs.

What is not open to much doubt is that Bell can play the polemicist: he reacts strongly to many a thing, be it a new Middle Eastern war or an ad for cocoa, without mucking about too long with the messy business of equivocation. Which is probably why he has garnered wealth and criticism in equal proportion. Indeed, despite this polemicism, you get the feeling that his is a life where opposites have always co-existed, like forces in an atom; a life where the ups and downs and lefts and rights and goods and bads seem to travel in pairs. His is the story of relentless contrasts, one of which is his journey from humble to grand. Bell now has access to substantial wealth, but it didn’t start like this, and for all the elegance of the life he now enjoys, his origins offer the contrast:

I was born in 1941 and brought up in a middle-class, north London, semi-detached house. My Irish father left home when I was five, and my mother was subsidised by my grandfather and worked at a laundry at night to supplement her income. We went to state schools; myself and the two sisters; one emigrated at 18 to live in America, and the other one eventually married an architect and lives in Brookmans Park and makes her own chutney.

Theirs was an upper-middle-class existence without the associated comforts, and it goes a long way to explaining the genesis of his political convictions:

There was much more division than people ever realise, and sub-divisions within each class: there was an upper class and a middle class and a lower class, with subdivisions within all of those, and within the middle class were the nouveau riche, which we weren’t. Upper middle class, which we were, meant that you observed etiquette and manners and protocol rather more than other people did. You were embedded. You had got a generational history of being the middle class. My grandfather’s job was the classic sort of upper-class managerial role. But there was no money in the family.

I couldn’t go to university, because it would have been another four years of contributing nothing and living off my mother, who was already working and nearly killing herself. I understood that I had to get a job. I’d been to a grammar school and that was the ethic: you went to school to be educated to get a job. You didn’t have career development programmes run by Richard Branson and people like that. You had schoolmasters and an education system, the point of which was to qualify you to get a job. We were, to paraphrase J. K. Galbraith, as functionaries without capital: Canute-like we stood against the rising tide of proletarianisation, and that’s what’s happened to my life.

From an early age, Bell had a moral certainty that would define his world view. And from that early age, he wanted to get into politics. The main reason being that it seemed the quickest route to a shag:

At home, my stepfather was very aware of politics and talked about politics, through him being a City alderman and a mayor. We lived in a constituency of very high profile politicians: Reg Maudling on one side, Cecil Parkinson to the north, and, as it turned out, Thatcher to the other side. I joined the Young Conservatives because that’s what you did if you wanted to be connected and meet people. You joined the church, you joined the Boy Scouts, you joined the community structures; all of them were unquestionably conservative with a small c, and most of them were Conservative with a capital C. That’s how you mixed.

I went out with the Conservative agent’s daughter. Everybody did actually. You joined the Young Conservatives because that gave you access to her: it was as simple and obvious as that. We all tried to shag her.

As it happened, the lady in question wasn’t having any of that kind of thing, so, alas, she must now disappear from our tale as quickly as she arrived, leaving us with the wisdom that politics can be a frustrating business.

Perhaps opinionated at times, Bell is not an overconfident person: more often charming than angry; more Humphrey Appleby than Malcolm Tucker. He is very aware and proud of his successes, yet only too well aware of his failings.

I am naturally good at certain things, but I can never be bothered to practise to make myself excellent at them. It’s been the story of my life. I was good at cricket, but not great. I was a fanatical modern-jazz fan and I played the trumpet, but my trumpet-playing days have now gone – it’s the lips. I have a natural ability to play the piano, but I don’t practise, so I don’t play it as well as I could do.

I never made any secret of the fact that I wanted to be somebody, not just be a piece of cannon fodder. And I think I measured success by visibility. I recognised that nobody would know who the hell you were if you didn’t do something that they could see. For a period, I played in bands. You’d get £10 for playing at the London Palladium, £20 for going to Manchester, but that would cost you £30 on the train to get to play in Tommy McQuater’s Pick Up Band. Or play at The Marquee Club, which you had to do for nothing. But then I would think, will I be good enough or should I do something more serious?

At the point where he could quite easily have carried on as a musician, Bell took another route. And he was rewarded with some good luck, reinforcing his view that just because you are doing well at one thing, you should not pass over the opportunity of doing something different.

When I was 18, my mother said it was time to go and get a job and it didn’t occur to me to question it. It was like telling me to put some trousers on. She sent me to an employment agency called The Stella Fisher Agency, in Fleet Street, who got me three interviews: one with an insurance company for post-boy, one with a publishing company for post-boy, and one with ABC Television as post-boy. All three offered me the job.

The one with the television company turned out to be wonderful because on the first day I walked through the door at Vogue House in Hanover Square and held it open for a young, thin girl called Jean Shrimpton and a long-haired kid called David Bailey. They were promoting Sammy Davis, Jr on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, hosting the press conference in the reception at Vogue House, so I walked in, and there he was. He was going out with a Swedish girl called May Britt at the time, and there was Sammy. I mean, it felt like I was entering showbiz.

Right place, right time. One man’s good luck is another man’s smart management and the line where one stops and the other starts is moot. There are many such instances that pepper his life story, and none is better known than Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979: a moment that transformed Britain, although whether for better or worse is an argument that has been raging ever since. By the late seventies, Bell had made his way from ABC post-boy to advertising executive, working for Geers Gross and then Saatchi & Saatchi, where he became media director in 1970, moving on to become managing director and then CEO. Another day; another phone call; another lucky break.

A man called Gordon Reece rang up Saatchi & Saatchi and asked to speak to Maurice Saatchi who was on holiday. So they put the call through to me. He asked me if we wanted to handle the Conservative Party account, and I told him that I would be happy to do it, but I’d have to consult with my colleagues because I didn’t think they voted Conservative. I rang Maurice and said to him, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and he said ‘Ring Charles’, so I rang Charles and he said, ‘OK. As long as you do it, all right?’

By the close of the decade, Britain was filling up with uncollected bins and unburied bodies. Sunny Jim Callaghan had hung on too long and an enormous poll lead had chilled into a winter of discontent and a government in denial, prompting The Sun headline, ‘Crisis. What crisis?’ After a Parliamentary Motion of No Confidence, the General Election was called; it would see the iconic Saatchi poster ‘Labour isn’t working’.

I was asked by Gordon Reece to go to the Leader of the Opposition’s room in the House of Commons, to meet with Airey Neave and then to meet Margaret Thatcher. In those days there were no police. You just drove in past the Parliament gatehouse and parked in the St Stephen’s entrance, where nowadays you have to go through about fourteen different metal detectors. We walked up an incredibly complicated spiral of staircases, to meet this rather shambolic figure in a raincoat in the corridor, Airey Neave, who spoke with a pronounced Irish accent. I didn’t really understand a word he said…

I was shown a door which said it was the Leader of the Opposition’s office and there was an anteroom with two girls sitting at old-fashioned typewriters and one of them looked up and said, ‘Who are you?’ and I said ‘I’m here to see the Leader… I’m from Saatchi & Saatchi’. She said, ‘Oh, Starsky and Hutch! Sit there!’ So I did what I was told until Gordon eventually appeared and we walked in to see Margaret Thatcher herself.

There was a brown velvet armchair and a brown velvet sofa. She was sitting at her desk. She just said, ‘Sit down’. But instead of sitting in the chair, I sat in the middle of the sofa like a fucking idiot where you’ve got no arm support and you just float. I sat there like a complete prat.

She said, ‘What’s your favourite poem?’ and I said ‘If’. She looked at me very suspiciously, fumbled in her handbag, took out a copy of that same poem and said ‘Who told you?’ I said, ‘Nobody told me. It’s my favourite poem.’ Then she said, ‘What’s your favourite speech?’ and I said ‘Abraham Lincoln’. She said, ‘I fail to see how making the rich poor makes the poor rich. Who told you?’ I said, ‘Absolutely nobody. They are my favourites.’

So then she just said, ‘We’re going to get on. But I want you to understand three things. Firstly, politicians have very, very large toes and very large fingers, and it is very easy to tread on them. But I have neither. You will always tell me the truth.’ ‘Yes, Leader,’ I said like a good boy. She said, ‘Secondly, if you’ve got some trick that will get me elected, please don’t use it, because if the people don’t want me, it won’t work.’

Now, I think that is probably about the purest definition of democracy that I’ve ever heard. Then, she said, ‘Third. You will get a lot of abuse for working for me. I hope you’re a big boy.’ I said, ‘I hope so.’ She said, ‘Right. Well, we’ll get on then. Take him out, Gordon.’ And, at that, I was escorted from the room.

Bell makes no secret of his veneration of Lady Thatcher. She was at his side when he was introduced into the Lords in 1998, and he even calls her his ‘heroine’. The fact that some members of the British public still regard her as the Devil incarnate only serves to confirm to him that she had the right idea and that the enemies she made – from within and from without – were exactly the enemies she should have made.

There was just this sort of aura that surrounded her. And I did always tell her the truth, without hesitation. She didn’t always accept it. She didn’t always see it as the truth as I saw it. But she was just fantastic. She changed me completely. She made me 100% politically aware of everything. Everything I now do or think, I think about from a political point of view and that came directly from her.

She had absolutely no small talk and you didn’t do small talk with her. I was brought up in a well-mannered society, so I would always compliment her on the way she looked or, if she’d got a new dress on, I’d say it was a nice dress. But she didn’t have any reaction to such comments.

We became known as ‘courtiers’ from the cynics and the faceless, insecure men who hadn’t got the courage to speak in front of her, which was about 80% of the Shadow Cabinet at that time, because they were unbelievably uncomfortable with her. They couldn’t come to terms with what had happened. It was as if their wife had come into the office and had turned overnight into their boss. They simply couldn’t understand it. How could it have happened? How could it be that this woman was in charge?

‘This woman’ looks at us as we do the interview. There is a large portrait of her in Bell’s office, propped up on the floor. The eyes follow you around the room, sternly, disapprovingly, whatever the angle, whatever you’re doing.

The great privilege of my life was working with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who were both people of great vision. But neither was in the least bit interested in what the personal rewards were from the achievement. They weren’t interested in power because of the title or because of the robes or because of the grand cars. They had a vision about their society, their community, or their country.

I met Reagan in Washington. Bill Brock [chairman of the Republican National Committee] had asked for someone to present to the nominees for the Republican candidature in 1980. I’d just done Thatcher’s election, and there were some commonalities with inflation and unemployment, and they thought there was something to learn, so I trotted across to Washington. Unbeknownst to Maurice and Charles Saatchi: I never told them because I knew if I did say anything, Maurice would say he’d go, and as he hadn’t done nearly as much as me in handling the election campaign I was fucked if he was going to get any of the glory.

I gave the presentation to five people sitting behind a desk: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Howard Baker, John Connally, who was the Governor of Texas, and John Anderson, who in the end stood as an independent candidate. My presentation was really embarrassing because I wasted 20 minutes of it trying to explain the difference in the electoral systems which, of course, they had not the slightest interest in. Then Reagan gave me a jelly bean. He had a big jar of jelly beans on the table in front of him.

One is reminded at this juncture of Reagan’s famous comment, ‘You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jelly beans.’ Presumably, Bell ate them in an approved way, because Reagan took a liking to the English guy in front of him, embarrassing presentation or not.

Ford was there because he was the sitting president, and he was unbelievably charming and polite and courteous. Then there was John Connally. If you’d asked me which one would you expect to be the president, I’d have picked Connally, because he was dark-eyed and seemed extremely smart. [During the JFK assassination in Dallas, Connally had been travelling in the presidential car and was seriously wounded.] Howard Baker was like a secretariat; a minister of questions. I would never have picked Reagan to win, because the image of him as the cowboy Hollywood buffoon had permeated everything. But he came across as very charming, very well mannered, and was a very, very big man. I felt like he was like my grandfather. He was physically big and big in presence.

In the end, I spent quite a lot of time with Reagan, most of which I’ll never tell anybody about because it’s entirely private. He wasn’t like Thatcher in the sense of understanding detail. He didn’t do detail. But he understood a very simple thing: that there is no reason for America not to be the greatest country in the world, and his one job as president was to achieve that.

Thatcher’s philosophy was very similar. She said, ‘I will make Britain great again and I will do so by making British people think they’re great.’ The overwhelming feeling that you got from her was that anything was possible. That she would lead you and take all the bullets and all the bloodshed and all the shit, just to get there. She didn’t care at all for herself.

Bell must be a man who has a coffee-table-sized address book and still needs a supplement. The phones ring throughout the interview, and he answers them, but not so as you feel he’s being impolite to us, his interviewers. Sometimes, it is the kids wanting money; other times, it is a foreign dignitary or an American movie star; sometimes it is from a floor below; sometimes, from a distant embassy. In his time, Bell has worked with governments across the world, some more wholesome than others; some he is proud to have been involved with, such as de Klerk in South Africa (which was controversial, but which he feels did a lot of good); others he feels in retrospect should have been avoided.

The calls are all answered in the same way, same voice, same tone, same mannerisms, regardless of the caller being kings or kids, not at all inhibited by our awkward presence there in the room. ‘Sorry. Won’t be a minute.’ ‘Sorry about that.’ His phone is a modest one, and he eschews smartphones because of the ‘acres of spam’ that he doesn’t want to look at, and the fact that he can’t work them anyway. ‘E-mail is a monologue and I prefer telephone dialogue,’ he says.

Bell left the Saatchis in 1985 and went to work with the advertising guru Frank Lowe. ‘I adored Frank, and didn’t know what to do next, so I went to work with him.’ But it didn’t work out. It’s another example of a life with as many downs as ups. Even his peerage was not a straightforward matter, generating bitter controversy at the time.

I got a knighthood in 1990 in Mrs Thatcher’s Resignation Honours List, which anybody will tell you is the only list to be on. Then I got the peerage at the recommendation of William Hague to Tony Blair in 1998. It gets me very good tables in restaurants. It makes my driver call me ‘my lord’, which I laugh at, but he’s a Gurkha and he likes calling me it. I don’t take it seriously. I don’t think it puts me in some different part of life than anybody else.

Bell claims that he is ‘well off’ rather than ‘rich’, which is the kind of thing that will annoy the Polly Toynbees of the world. In what he sees as a significant contrast with Champagne Socialist hypocrisy, he is proud of his wealth and sees no reason to hide it. Money has played a role in his ambitions from a young age.

I’d always had this feeling that I should carry a higher price ticket on my head than anybody else. I was competitive because that made me feel better, and partly because my stepfather always had the view that the best things were the most expensive things, and he inculcated me with this idea.

What does all the money bring? Comfort is the answer. I get up in the morning in a big house. I have a rack of clothes to choose from. I get in a chauffeur-driven car to go to the office. I can go to any restaurant. But in the past, I’ve had an irresponsible disregard for the value of money. I got money, I spent it. I made £9 million when I sold my shares in Saatchi & Saatchi, but wrote a cheque for £6 million to the Inland Revenue because, like an idiot, I sold the shares three months before Margaret reduced capital gains tax to 40% and I even knew she was going to do that. I’m just careless like that. The rest I spent on indulging myself and buying a house. One third of it was put into a very good investment, and the rest was frittered, but it gave me a lot of experience. I had fun. I enjoyed myself…

And I’ve never wished to leave some lasting edifice. I’m not interested in having Bell Pottinger preserved for a thousand years – though I believe you should run a business as though it were going to be there for a thousand years because that makes you make the right moral and ethical decisions about the way you run it and to some extent the right commercial decisions. I don’t give a damn about material possessions. I don’t care if my house disappears, once I’ve gone. I suppose I’d want to write a really trite epithet for my gravestone: ‘He made a difference’… I find the status quo frustrating and annoying and full of anomalies and bad things: if only I could feel I’d helped remedy that. I’m not a pioneer, but I like pioneers and I like working with them.

Bell often mentions the idea of risk. He has an understanding of it, and an interpretation of how it should be managed. Money, ambition, risk – he makes them sound like the three gifts brought by the kings to the stable in Bethlehem.

I take risks. It comes from my father who was an alcoholic. Also, from the brothers Saatchi who had an enormous influence on my life, and Charles [Saatchi] is an inveterate risk-taker. But I also try to be reasonable. To the extent that I have a correct analysis of myself, I think I am an intensely reasonable person and I think that’s why I have been a fairly successful entrepreneur: because I take reasonable risk and not unreasonable risk.