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Westminster wives
Mar 14th
She swears, she drinks, she has extramarital flings… The modern MP’s wife is unrecognisable from the simpering cheerleader of the past. So what has changed? And what impact will the other halves have on this year’s election?
When Alicia Collinson’s husband, Damian Green, was first elected as a Conservative MP in 1997, she was provided with a small pamphlet produced by the Parliamentary Christian Wives Fellowship. It was called “Two for the Price of One” and the title was printed across the cover in precisely the same shade of green as the leather benches inside the House of Commons chamber. The eight-page leaflet contained all manner of helpful tips and guidance on how to be a politician’s wife in a breezy style that seemed to have come straight from the 1950s.
“If you look good, you feel good,” the authors stated cheerily, before going on to advise that: “For wives, it is a great help to have a very good relationship with your local garage as you are bound to break down when your dearly beloved is on a parliamentary trip to China and you may need rescuing.”
But it was one sentence in particular that enraged Alicia Collinson. “It’s this one,” she says, pushing the pamphlet across the coffee table and jabbing at the relevant page. “They say: ‘Try to ensure the absent parent speaks each week on the phone to each child personally if possible.’” Collinson snorts with indignation. “That really got my goat. It’s full of things like that, assuming you can do things while your husband’s in parliament. Well, no, you can’t if you’re working, too. There was this assumption that you were just part of the package.”
Times have changed dramatically for the political wife. In previous decades an MP’s wife was expected to be little more than a photogenic adjunct to her husband, someone who could be relied upon to judge cake-baking contests at the village fete and smile prettily in public. Most of the time this charming little creature would be careful not to speak out of turn or proffer any political opinion that might risk embarrassing her husband or his party. Her role, like that of Clementine Churchill or Clarissa Eden before her, was to raise children, run a household and provide constant support to her overworked and sporadically bad-tempered spouse.
On the rare occasion that a wife did speak out, it resulted in a horrified outcry. Margot, the wife of former prime minister Herbert Asquith, was blamed for her husband’s political downfall after she publicly accused her stepson of being drunk. (He had, in fact, been shell-shocked during the First World War.) Now, however, Margot Asquith’s indelicate comment would barely merit a raised eyebrow. In modern politics, it is quite normal for the wife of the chancellor to scream the “c” word in reference to her husband’s treacherous colleagues, as Maggie Darling was reported to have done in Andrew Rawnsley’s recent book about the fall of New Labour. Over the past few months a worrying number of political wives (and it is, on the whole, still largely wives rather than husbands) have crawled out of the woodwork to admit to all sorts of brazen peccadilloes, including binge drinking, promiscuity and the odd extramarital affair.
Sally Bercow, the wife of the Commons speaker, gave an extraordinary interview last December in which she admitted to a debauched past, drinking more than two bottles of wine a day and engaging in a string of one-night stands. “I would end up sometimes at a bar and someone would send a drink over, and I’d think: ‘Why not?’ and we’d go home together,” she said. “I liked the excitement of not knowing how a night was going to end.”
Unlike the quietly spoken, loyal wife of parliamentary legend, Mrs Bercow appeared to be wholly unconcerned as to whether she might be diminishing her husband’s professional kudos. Her political opinions, too, are unashamedly opposed to her spouse’s: whereas John Bercow was a Tory MP before becoming speaker, Sally Bercow is standing as a Labour councillor in Pimlico, central London.
Then, in January, it emerged that Iris Robinson, the wife of the Northern Irish first minister, had an affair with a 19-year-old when she was 58. The ensuing barrage of “Mrs Robinson”-themed newspaper headlines forced Peter Robinson to stand down temporarily. Although both the Robinson and Bercow sagas are extreme examples, there is a growing trend for parliamentary spouses to emerge from the shadows.
Samantha Cameron, wife of the Conservative leader, is creative director at Smythson, the luxury stationery firm. Ed Miliband’s partner, Justine Thornton, is a senior environmental lawyer. Sarah Brown, wife of the prime minister, enjoyed a successful career in public relations before taking up permanent residence in No 10. Shadow chancellor George Osborne’s wife, Frances, is a bestselling biographer, and Sandra Howard, wife of former Conservative leader Michael Howard, has written three novels.
“I think the role has changed a bit,” says Mrs Howard, whose latest novel, A Matter of Loyalty, was published last year. “Three decades ago there were more wives who didn’t have their own career. Cherie Blair did us a really good service by continuing to work as a barrister while her husband was the prime minister because no one could ever complain about a spouse working again.”
“It’s a shift that mirrors what has happened in society,” agrees Alicia Collinson, author of Politics for Partners: How to Live with a Politician and a barrister specialising in family law. She deliberately chose not to take her husband’s surname. “I got very criticised in the press when Damian first became involved in politics because I was a barrister and had my own job, but now the constituency isn’t fussed about it… I used to know one MP who talked about his wife being ‘the hostage’ in the constituency.” Collinson takes a sip of her tea. “He’s now married to someone else.”
Not only are political wives no longer quite held hostage in the shires, they are seen as potential vote-winners. The impact of Michelle Obama, who has expanded the role of political wife and is seen as a crucial asset to her husband’s success, is beginning to make itself felt in the UK. Whereas in the past an MP’s spouse was occasionally wheeled out by central office for a pre-election photo opportunity, the modern political wife has a far more complex role. She must juggle the demands of career and family while developing a public persona that is sufficiently straightforward to be inoffensive and yet interesting enough to intrigue the electorate. Her clothes will be scrutinised and her past raked over. She is expected to have an opinion and yet to keep it to herself. And when her husband films a YouTube broadcast from his bespoke Notting Hill kitchen, she must appear in the background amid the cereal boxes and Blu-Tacked toddlers’ paintings, busy and yet in control: the perfect appeal to the Mumsnet generation.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that some political wives, like Sally Bercow or Iris Robinson, chafe against the restrictions imposed upon them. Others, like Miriam González Durántez, wife of the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, take a more relaxed approach. González, who heads up the trade department of the international law firm DLA Piper, says that a political wife can be “supportive without being submissive… I am sufficiently confident to understand I can have a proper career, and I also understand I happen to be married to Nick and people will want legitimately to have a look into who he is as a person – and provided that they respect our children I’m happy for anybody to have a look. What you see is what you get.”
When we meet in a boardroom at her company headquarters in London, González seeps unapologetic glamour. She has film-star looks and hair that appears expensively blow-dried. Today she is wearing a grey silk shift dress, a chunky gold necklace and fashionable high-heeled ankle boots. It would be difficult to imagine anyone less like the pink-cheeked, floral-swathed MP’s wife of popular imagination.
González embodies the new breed of “Sam Cams”, the independent career women and mothers who happen to be married to politicians but who are determined not to be defined by their spouses and who share the running of the household as equally as possible. The Cleggs have three sons under the age of eight: their father takes them to school every morning and their mother puts them to bed at night.
“Nick’s well known with the neighbours for going to do a very early interview and coming back to go to school before going to Westminster,” says González. Do the children understand what their father does? “Partly. My five-year-old thinks he’s the captain of the Liberal Democrats. My eight-year-old is quite perceptive and understands some of it – he advises on plans to capture Osama bin Laden.”
Westminster hours, however, remain extremely inconvenient for MPs with young children (even since Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, when 120 of the new MPs were women, many of whom were appalled by the unsociable working hours and pitifully outdated office equipment). “It isn’t friendly for families,” says González. “I remember, for example, being very, very shocked – and let’s put this into context: it must be a Westminster village reaction – but I remember Nick saying at some point: ‘I’m a father before being a politician’, and some colleagues were actually thinking: ‘What a weird thing to say.’ I was thinking: ‘Surely that is a perfectly normal thing to say?’ I think it’s incredibly unuseful that Westminster tends to vote at 10 in the evening rather than at four in the afternoon, like you would do in any other kind of job. There’s a lot of evening engagements and media engagements, and that takes a toll on the family.”
It is perhaps partly for this reason that some wives still choose to stay quietly behind the scenes, determinedly ignoring the onward march of equal opportunities. For every Miriam González there is a “Surrendered Wife” like Norma Major, who stood smiling and faithful beside her husband without uttering a single controversial word in public throughout his premiership and who remained loyal to him even after it emerged that he’d had an affair with Edwina Currie. Pauline Prescott, who stood by husband John despite a dalliance with his secretary, calls herself one of a “dying breed” in her autobiography, and is dismissive of “women’s libbers”.
Sandra Howard, who did not publish her first book until her husband had stood down as leader, says the old-style political wife works on the principle that “anything you can do to help, you do. If allowing the person you love to do what they want to do means a little bit of not thinking about what you want to do, it’s almost a non-question.”
The Surrendered Wife must bite her tongue when asked for her opinion, lest she run the risk of embarrassing her husband. “I remember being told that a political spouse will never win the seat for their partner, but they can sure as hell lose it,” says Howard.
When the expenses scandal broke last year, it emerged that almost 80 MPs employed either their wives or girlfriends as parliamentary assistants, secretaries or case workers. (Political husbands are still very much the exception to the rule: Caroline Flint, the Labour MP for Don Valley, employs her husband Phil Cole to run her constituency office, while Margaret Beckett’s spouse, Leo, has been her parliamentary assistant for years.) At the time, there was an outcry at the thought of family members cashing in courtesy of the taxpayer, and the rules governing the employment of spouses and family members are currently under review. The constituency wives, many of whom had worked extremely hard for their MP husbands, felt they had been unfairly scapegoated. Alicia Collinson recalls a trip to the local garden centre with her husband at the height of the expenses scandal to buy some plants. “A man driving his car wound down his window and shouted out: ‘I hope you’ve got a receipt for that,’ and then drove off thinking he was very clever. We’ve never claimed for gardening. It was just ignorant.
“The climate has changed. The respect that parliamentarians were held in is no more… the level of contempt one experiences is quite extraordinary. It’s been very unpleasant. A lot of spouses have been very upset.”
Another wife, who has run her husband’s constituency office for the last 17 years, says: “I got very badly bruised by the whole thing. People don’t realise how hard we work or the hours we put in. We’re the ones who are there at seven in the morning or 11 at night when the phone goes.”
It is perhaps these wives – the uncomplaining troopers who keep their husbands’ schedules organised and their stationery cupboards stocked with Post-it notes – who provide the bridge between the surrendered spouses of the past and the sleekly independent career women of modern times.
But although the increasing number of MPs’ wives pursuing their own careers has been heralded as some sort of feminist breakthrough, much of the media coverage of these women remains distinctly sexist. There is a lingering sense, in spite of the enormous strides made by women such as Cherie Booth and Miriam González, that a political wife’s role is to gaze adoringly at her husband as he makes a keynote speech or to be photographed walking along the Brighton seafront during party conference season, appearing well dressed but not too glamorous in case she is accused of being out of touch with the common man (or woman).
So it is that Sarah Brown – doubtless influenced by the intimate confessions of her Michelle Obama about the president’s bad morning breath – has twice taken to the podium to introduce her husband to the Labour party conference. In 2008 she smiled ingratiatingly and called him “my hero”. Last year she exclusively revealed that Gordon was “not a saint – he’s messy, he’s noisy, he gets up at a terrible hour”.
Mrs Brown, who gave up a career in PR, has carved out a niche as an electoral accessory whose job it is to show Gordon in a warmer, more modern light. One minute Mrs Brown will be in a TV studio, eyes welling up as she listens to her husband unburden his soul to Piers Morgan, the next she will be opening London Fashion Week wearing an Erdem dress and updating her Twitter account (1,118,558 followers and counting, including Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell).
Sarah Brown has provided us with a whole new category of political spouse: a wife who knows how to exploit modern media in order to promote herself and her husband as a successful brand. She is known to have used her sartorial influence to overhaul her husband’s wardrobe and her PR savvy to insist that the couple went on holiday in Southwold, Suffolk last year in an effort to prove their fondness for England. In fact, so successful has she been in modelling herself as cheerleader-in-chief that one member of the prime minister’s inner circle is said to have dubbed her “Mrs Goebbels”.
As the general election approaches, the leaders’ wives in particular will have a prominent role to play in wooing the voters. Already there have been snide comments emanating from government sources that Samantha Cameron does less charity work than her counterpart in No 10. And at the recent Tory spring conference it felt as though far more attention was paid to the cut of Mrs Cameron’s silk ruffled blouse than to what her husband had to say about fixing “broken Britain”.
“I think the trouble with politicians is they have a fixed image in the media which doesn’t involve their personality,” says Alicia Collinson. “So having another side to both David Cameron and Gordon Brown and allowing their wives to convey something that isn’t just the stiff upper lip of a politician can be helpful for the electorate in the run-up to an election. They can see what a politician is like from every angle.”
But reactions to Sarah Brown’s celebrity among the other political wives are mixed. Some find her acting the part of adoring spouse on the national stage a touch retrograde. Miriam González says she’d always go to see Nick deliver a major speech and would expect him to do the same, but adds that: “I wouldn’t ask him to come to the podium to kiss me afterwards, and that is not what I’d do in reverse.” Others, like Alicia Collinson, believe that having a loyal wife in the public eye “suggests that the politician has at least got good taste”.
And perhaps in the end it is not a wholly irrational reason to vote for a particular MP. They might lie about tax rises, cheat on their expenses and have terrible breath in the morning, but at least they have the love of a good woman who knows how to make friends with Paris Hilton on Twitter.
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Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking by Pauline Prescott | Book review
Mar 14th
Pauline Prescott’s story is one of remaining plucky and loyal through good times and bad. A national treasure, says Rachel Cooke
It’s easy to sneer at Pauline Prescott, to take the mickey out of her fondness for such things as cutting the crusts off sandwiches, and plenty of people already have. They should be ashamed of themselves. The older I get, the more I admire women like her: kind, self-effacing, loyal, plucky, polite, always beautifully turned out. Her pleasure in simple things – a decent bun, the occasional illicit glass of hotel champagne – speaks to the deracinated Yorkshirewoman in me, who was brought up to believe that the very worst thing you can be is spoilt. Midway through her autobiography, Prescott refers to the “Beverley days out” she enjoys with her girlfriends. If you don’t know Beverley, the minster town that passes for posh in the East Riding, this phrase will be lost on you. But it wasn’t lost on me. The treat of Beverley! Faster than you can say “Dorneywood”, I was on the internet, looking for a hotel.
Dorneywood, traditionally the Chancellor’s grace and favour house, is where Pauline and her husband spent their weekends during the decade he was deputy prime minister. The original plan, on his elevation in 1997, was that he would get Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s retreat. But Pauline took one look and thought: too big, much as she did when she first saw the couple’s rather grand castellated home in Hull (“All I could think was: how am I going to clean all this?”). This is Pauline all over: easier to get Cherie Blair to admit that Tony cocked up Iraq than to turn Pauline Prescott’s head. Of course, if it did happen to turn, not a hair would stir in the process. When she married her merchant seaman beau in 1961, in a satin dress from Nola Gowns of Chester, her day was ruined by, among other things, the fact that her “industrial-strength” hairspray melted the diamante on her tiara, spattering her back-combed hair with silver. In her book, Pauline pays dutiful lip service to her husband’s Labour values; when he first stood for parliament, she made him the biggest, reddest rosette you’ve ever seen. But you can tell that what she really believes in is the power of the can, be it hairspray or furniture polish.
Pauline Tilston was born in Chester in 1939, the daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner. As she tells it in Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, the family is poor but happy, and Pauline, a keen dancer, dreams only of becoming a television “topper”. Then, calamity. Her beloved father dies suddenly; her brother contracts TB and is exiled to a sanitorium; her mother suffers an industrial accident at a local laundry. It’s all a bit John Braine at this point. Life, however, picks up when Pauline, beautiful and by now a hairdresser, begins dating an American serviceman called Jim. She likes Jim so much she gives him her bronze tap-dancing medal as a keepsake. He is married but intends divorcing his wife, or so he claims. When he leaves for home, Pauline is certain that he will return and claim her.
You know what’s coming next. Poor old Pauline, who is only 16, discovers that she is pregnant. Jim does not return, and his girl is dispatched to St Bridget’s House of Mercy, a home for unwed mothers, where the nuns encourage her to scrub the floors because “this helps get the baby’s head into position”. Pauline’s mother insists she cannot keep her baby – there is no money – and, having resisted the idea of adoption for three long years, during which time her son, Paul, remains in state care, she signs the papers. By this time, Pauline is seeing John Prescott, whom she met at a bus stop (their first date was a trip to the cinema where her Uncle Wilf played the Wurlizter). Now, there is plenty to be said about Prescott and the way he carries on; when I interviewed him, he flung his legs over the arms of his chair and pointed his groin at me like a gun. But he comes out of this period faultlessly, often travelling with Pauline to visit Paul, and, unlike his mother, never making her feel in the slightest bit ashamed. Given the time, and their social class, is it any wonder that she married him?
John decrees that Pauline must stay in his constituency with their own two sons when he is in Westminster, so no exciting New Labour gossip in her book’s dull middle section. Yes, she discovers that her husband is bulimic – food keeps disappearing – but as her mother says: “It could have been worse, Pauline. John could have become an alcoholic, and that would have been much more expensive.” Flip through a few pages, however, and the story picks up. The tabloids find Paul, a Tory-voting military policeman, and they are joyfully reunited. Then John confesses to an affair with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary. I imagine that Pauline found telling her ghost writer about this extremely painful; certainly, she’s coy so far as the, er, ins and outs go. But you cheer when she describes her coping mechanism: her downstairs loo, which she is doing up, a project that cannot be derailed. Lipstick, mascara, a permanently boiling kettle: these things comprise Pauline’s armour, and it’s John, not her, who, some days later, must nervously inquire if their marriage is over. Even better, as she seems to know, these events, combined with her cherishable cameos in the television shows her husband has made since leaving government, have since turned our heroine into a bona fide national treasure. At Mr Chu’s of Hull, the Prescotts’ favourite restaurant, it’s now Pauline’s beautifully manicured hand that people secretly want to shake, and I don’t blame them. She’s great. A peach,and a trooper.
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Can I buy underwear and be green?
Mar 14th
Say pants to the pesticides used in manufacturing cotton!
You might be doubtful that your choice of briefs can be a catalyst for global change, but consider the statistics. The UK underwear market was valued at £4.1bn in 2009. Most of that money is spent on multinational-produced pants. Some are constructed from a mixture of oil-based synthetics, including nylon (which results in emissions of nitrous oxide, a poisonous greenhouse gas).
Received wisdom tells us that cotton, the main underwear fibre, is the type of natural material we need in these delicate regions. Received wisdom is wrong. Although cotton covers less than 1% of the earth’s landmass, it soaks up 25% of all pesticides and herbicides. A single pair of cotton pants uses 10ml of pesticides.
In the past year a number of NGOs have got their knickers in a twist about cotton pesticide endosulfan, banned in 62 countries. It is linked to reproductive and developmental damage in animals and humans and is manufactured by pharmaceutical brand Bayer. PantsToPoverty.com, a leader in fairtrade cotton underwear, instigated a “pants amnesty” whereby protestors sent their worst pair of pants to Bayer – which quickly pledged to phase out endosulfan by the end of 2010.
Greenknickers.org offers zero-carbon pants from recycled sources. Whomadeyourpants.co.uk is a workers’ co-operative in Southampton employing women who have been granted asylum but find it difficult to get work. They take knickers seriously (like Alan Greenspan, who has said he looks at sales of men’s underwear to indicate the direction of the economy). Ethical smalls can become a big deal.
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When the dotcom bubble burst the ideas didn’t just float away
Mar 14th
The internet boom and bust saw companies come and go, but the seeds of great website businesses were sown, and many of the entrepreneurs are still working
The streets of Silicon Valley are littered with survivors of the dotcom boom and bust – but while many retain vivid memories of the crash, few seem permanently scarred by the experience.
Among the most notorious failures was pets.com, an online pet shop that promised to deliver food and supplies across America at competitive prices. Founded in August 1998 and backed with tens of millions from investors including Amazon, the brand blew up quickly, with a popular ad campaign and a January 2000 Super Bowl spot that cost more than $1m (£660,000).
The company went public with an $83m stock offering a month later – weeks before the crash. Just nine months on, the company had collapsed and the truth about its business became clear: it had spent vast amounts on advertising while selling most of its products at a significant loss.
Founder Julie Wainwright remains unapologetic for the very public burnout, suggesting that “it was a great company, but the timing wasn’t”. She went on to run an online photo service and worked in venture capital, before starting women’s health website SmartNow two years ago. Even the fact that her husband filed for divorce just days after pets.com went under seems to have been part of the process. “I had two major life crises in the same week, one public and one private, that sent me on a journey of self-discovery and healing I couldn’t have anticipated,” she told the New York Times in 2008.
Wainwright’s story is one repeated by veterans all over the internet industry: their companies may have collapsed during the bust, but that failure is worn as a badge of honour.
In fact, despite the estimated $5tn lost when the internet bubble collapsed, it is the websites themselves that have fallen by the wayside – rather than the people behind them. A prime example is the web radio service broadcast.com, which was sold to Yahoo for $5.7bn in 1999 but no longer exists as a website in its own right.
While broadcast.com is dead, former chief executive Mark Cuban has gone on to become more famous than ever before, as the outspoken billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and Magnolia Pictures, distributor of films such as Food, Inc.
“I was fortunate enough to be part of a great company that got whisked away in the frenzy. I was also fortunate enough to recognise the difference between a company and a stock,” he says. “What was unfortunate was that with the bursting of the bubble came Yahoo basically killing off a company that was doing everything that YouTube does today but years earlier. But they paid me for the right to do whatever they wanted with it.”
Other sites that struggled through the bust have fallen into disrepair, obscurity or simply shut down. GeoCities, an early precursor to social networking sites, was bought by Yahoo for $3.5bn in 1999. It was left to languish after the crash and finally put down last year. Co-founder David Bohnett, who now runs his own foundation, says that although much of the enthusiasm died after the bust, many of the ideas developed have gone on to have a massive impact on millions of people. “GeoCities paved the way for the success of today’s social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace,” he says. “The internet has continued to evolve in wonderful ways in the last 10 years.”
Not every site from the boom has withered, however. One of the biggest success stories, Amazon, bullied its way through the crash – despite not posting its first profit until 2002. Boss Jeff Bezos bet everything on the idea that heavy, long-term investment would corner the online retail market, even if it meant losses in the short term, and it paid off. He is now ranked 43rd richest man on the planet, with a net worth of $12.3bn.
While many entrepreneurs saw their paper fortunes dwindle with the crash, some of the sharpest criticism was aimed at the bankers and investors who had helped fuel the dotcom rollercoaster with soaring valuations.
They too, by and large, recovered quickly from the after-effects of the crash. Mary Meeker, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, was famed for her predictions on internet stocks and crowned in 1998 as the “queen of the net” by Barron’s magazine. Despite the crash, she was an important player in a boardroom coup several years ago and continues to command respect as a managing director of the company’s technology group.
Even one of the villains of the era, equities analyst Henry Blodget, has undergone something of a rehabilitation. Charged with fraud when it emerged that he had advised investors to buy shares in companies that he privately rubbished, Blodget eventually settled without admitting culpability for a total of $4m in fines and other payments. Barred from ever working in the securities industry again, he returned to his previous career as a journalist and now runs a popular industry news blog, Business Insider.
Cuban says that despite the tumult caused, few lessons have been learned in the United States. “Sad thing is that nothing has changed,” he says. “In 2000 it was the internet stocks. A couple of years ago it was real estate and mortgages. In five years it will be something else. We live for bubbles in this country. The internet bubble was just one example of the many that have happened. It’s shocking that so few seem to learn so little from history that they repeat it over and over.”
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Paul Harris | Carlos Slim Helu: In the money, but who would know it?
Mar 14th
Until last week few had heard of the new richest man in the world. Fellow Mexicans, however, know all about his clout, saying they live in Slimlandia
Until recently, articles introducing the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim have often run under some variation of the headline: “The richest man you’ve never heard of”. That is unlikely to be the case for much longer.
Slim was anointed last week by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the world, unseating Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He is worth a staggering $53.5bn, which is not a bad sum for a man born to an immigrant father in the teeming but desperately poor metropolis of Mexico City.
At first glance Slim’s unseating of Gates seems counter-intuitive. Gates is a product of the modern information age that has transformed the world’s economy in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, Slim has made his fortune building an old-fashioned conglomerate empire with a finger in every pie from cement to telephones to restaurants.
Gates’ business hails from Seattle, one of the most cutting-edge cities in the world for technological innovation, and Gates himself lives in a lavish, ultra-modern home. Slim comes from the relative backwater of Mexico, a country whose economy traditionally bleeds poor workers north across the Rio Grande in search of riches. He struggles with computers, and even mobile phones, and still to a large extent relies on simple charts he drafts himself. He lives in a modest six-bedroom mansion that is luxurious by the standards of most of his fellow countrymen but small when compared to many much less successful Mexicans.
Yet now Slim sits on top of the global billionaire pile, an unlikely king who wields a power known only to a few, and most of them tend to have entire countries at their beck and call. And he has done it the old-fashioned way. He buys when prices are low, then watches his wealth accumulate. Then he buys again. He has been the master of the fire sale, swooping in to snap up bargains in the midst of panics and sell-offs. All of which actually makes the current state of the world uniquely suited to a man of Slim’s talents. For, in the middle of a recession, prices have rarely been lower. Slim is already buying again, snapping up stakes in Citigroup and the New York Times. In 2008, he became the largest shareholder in the newspaper and, in some estimates, helped save it from bankruptcy.
Do not look for Slim’s wealth to go down anytime soon or for him to disappear from the headlines. The world’s subeditors are now going to have to think of more original ways to describe a man set to become a household name.
Carlos Slim Helu was born the fifth of six children to Lebanese-Mexicans who ran successful small businesses in Mexico City. His mother, Linda Helu, came from a distinguished famil of Lebanese origin who had brought the first Arabic printing press to Mexico in the 19th century. His father, Julian Slim Haddad, was more of a classic immigrant-on-the-make who had arrived in the country in 1902 in order to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army.
In this marriage of the artsy middle-class girl with a working-class striver it was clear that the influence of his father won out. Julian had set up a dry goods store and then invested the profits in property during the Mexican revolution. He gave all his children a ledger and taught them how to keep track of simple financial transactions. Slim took that lesson to heart.
Slim started young. Even on the school playground he would carefully monitor the trades in baseball cards he made with other children so he could see if he was coming out ahead (he generally was). By 11 he had already bought his first government savings bonds. By 15 he had invested in Banco Nacional de México. He discovered a genuine fascination and obsession with numbers and the elaborate dances they play on a balance sheet. He could also see where those dances could be turned into making serious cash. He studied civil engineering at university and kept his passion for maths going by teaching algebra on the side. On graduation he became one of a clique called “los Casabolseros” or “the stock market boys”, young wheeler-dealers in the nascent world of the Mexican stock market. He started snapping up businesses, turning around a couple of companies, and then came the most important year of his life.
In 1982 Mexico plunged into economic crisis and, spurred on by a rising oil price, the government nationalised the banks. The country’s elite sold off their assets. There, waiting on the sidelines, as his father had taught him, was Slim. By the time the panic was over he had picked up dozens of companies at rock-bottom prices. Slim was now a major player and he only got bigger. He grew close to the rising star of Carlos Salinas, a modernising politician who became president in 1988. Wags dubbed the pair the “Carlos and Charlie show” after a local chain of rowdy bars.
But no one was laughing when a wave of privatisations began at what critics said were a series of undervalued deals. In 1990 Slim snapped up Telmex, the former state telephone firm. It was a sign of the times. Salinas’s privatisations created a new veneer of super wealth in Mexico. In 1991 the country had just two billionaires on Forbes’ rich list. Three years later, it had 24 and Slim was among the biggest. Just as Slim had often proved the value of knowing numbers, he also proved the value of knowing people.
His empire has grown since then, and is now vast in scope. He owns controlling interests in at least 222 different companies and minor stakes in countless more. By some estimates his firm accounts for a third of Mexico’s leading stock market index and some 7% of its annual economic output. By comparison John Rockefeller at the peak of his powers as a 19th-century industrialist was worth just 2.5% of American gross domestic product. The sheer scope of Slim’s holdings is breathtaking. It is virtually impossible for Mexicans to go about their lives without in some way contributing to his fortune. Some say Mexicans are really living in “Slimlandia”. They are born in Slim’s hospitals, drive on his Tarmac, smoke his tobacco. They build their houses from his cement, eat in his restaurants, talk on his phones, and sleep in bed linen made in his factories.
Many argue that creates an effective monopoly in too many industries, especially telecoms, allowing Slim to keep prices high. They see his tentacles stretching throughout the Mexican economy and complain that it stifles the county’s ability to generate small, independent companies. In Slim’s great power they see a suffocating blanket that helps keep Mexico poor and its people still looking to El Norte for their salvation. There may well be an economic truth to that argument (though Slim would argue against it). But there is also likely a hint of racial prejudice there. Mexicans have a mixed relationship with the world’s richest man. There is pride of having one of their own at the peak of the world’s financial pyramid. But there is distrust over his Lebanese background, though Slim himself says he knows no phrase in Arabic apart from swearwords.
Detractors aside, there is something universally appealing about Slim. The rich may be different to the rest of us, but Slim is a quite human billionaire. His modest mansion reflects none of the egomania so common among other industrialists and billionaires, including Gates. He owns no yacht, nor any home outside Mexico (what is the point, he says, when hotels are cheaper and less trouble). He does not spend much of his huge wealth and indeed is still known to drive a hard bargain for even day-to-day things. One friend has recounted a holiday spent with Slim in Italy during which the billionaire haggled for two hours to knock the price of a tie down by $10.
He is still a family man and has his family over for a communal meal every week, just like millions of other Mexicans. He married well – the Lebanese-Mexican Soumaya Domit Gemayel – who was the love of his life. When she died in 1999 he built an art museum and named it after her.
He is not a fixture in the gossip columns and has already handed off large chunks of the running of his businesses to his three sons. Not that he will ever retire fully.
In a life lived mostly on a curiously human scale, Slim has indulged a monumental passion for art. His home is not large but it is stuffed with sculptures by Rodin and paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh.
Yet it is still the numbers game that he loves most of all. Nor is that a game he will ever retire from. He sees his business not so much as a trading empire, but more like the works of art that adorn his walls. “Artists don’t just stop doing what they are doing because they have painted a beautiful painting,” he told one interviewer who asked about his retirement plans “They carry on until they die.”
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Bank charges: Overdrawn by 15p? Let’s call it £80
Mar 14th
One Alliance & Leicester customer’s penalty charge works out at 53,333%, finds Jill Insley
An Alliance & Leicester current account customer, charged £80 for going 15p overdrawn, is calling on the bank to introduce a “buffer” for those who mistakenly go into the red without permission.
Lewis Mathers, 20, from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, ran up an unauthorised overdraft for 11 days last November. Alliance & Leicester did not notify him immediately and he only noticed he had gone overdrawn on his monthly statement.
Since the amount was 15p he thought little of it. But the bank levied a £25 penalty and, because he used the account while overdrawn, the charges spiralled to £80. This is equivalent to a simple interest rate of 53,333% on the 15p, and two days’ pay for Lewis, who supports himself and girlfriend Charlene Jones, who has a heart condition, on a £200-a-week salary plus her £250-a-month disability living allowance.
Lewis’s father Nigel, a mortgage consultant, said: “We contacted Alliance & Leicester to let them know that they appeared to have made a terrible mistake but we were totally shocked when they said the charges were correct.
“We highlighted to them that the charges equated to a penalty interest rate of over 53,000% and an APR close to 2,000,000%, and that this could not be possible, but they simply said that if we were not happy we would need to put our complaint in writing. However, when we did this and asked them not to apply their charges while the account remained in dispute, they wrote to us stating that their charges were correct.”
When they continued to contest the charges, Alliance & Leicester said it would not refund them because of a Supreme Court ruling in November which said the OFT had no power to decide whether bank charges were fair or not. It said: “The Supreme Court decided, unanimously, that the level of banks’ unarranged overdraft charges could not be assessed for fairness. Therefore we do not believe that there is any legal basis on which the amount of the charges can be challenged or refunded, and hence the fees levied are valid.”
Mathers took his case to the Financial Ombudsman, complaining Alliance & Leicester’s charges were immoral and must be incorrect, but was told the service would be unable to help if his complaint related to the level of charges. Still, a spokeswoman for the service says all banks “should treat customers who are in financial hardship in a sympathetic and positive way and try to produce a resolution”. A low-income customer whose overdraft charges pile up because he is unable to clear the debt may be judged to be in financial hardship.
Eventually Alliance & Leicester agreed to refund most of the charges as a “gesture of goodwill”. But a bank spokesman said: “We believe that our fees are fair, legal and appropriate, and clearly explained. Customers have a responsibility to keep an eye on their finances, but if a customer believes they are going to go over their agreed limit, they should contact us to see how we can help.
“Mr Mathers was given plenty of notice of the fees being applied to his account, and as he was continually using his account to deposit and withdraw funds it would have been simple for him to have kept an eye on his balance and avoid the unauthorised overdraft fees.”
Although the Mathers are grateful the charges have been reduced, Nigel is still concerned other Alliance & Leicester customers will be caught out. He said: “If they want to be fair to customers they need to change their banking policy so that those who go overdrawn by very small amounts and/or for very short periods, should not be penalised at all, or should certainly not be penalised to the extent that they are.
“A large number of banks do allow a reasonable amount of flexibility in this area and offer an overdraft “buffer zone” or a time period whereby no charges apply. These other banks accept there will be certain where an account may go slightly overdrawn and do not feel the need to punish customers in those circumstances. I believe that Santander (which owns Alliance & Leicester) should look at those accounts and apply a similar policy so they can avoid treating their customers unfairly.”
A spokeswoman for Alliance & Leicester says the bank has no plans to change the structure of its accounts.
Draft dodging
A recent survey by Moneysupermarket.com found that 5 million Britons – or 10% of those old enough to have a bank account – are permanently overdrawn, while 12% drop into the red five times a year and 38% use their overdraft at least once a year. So which account suits what type of overdraft user?
• Occasionally overdrawn
Cheapest: The Halifax Reward current account is the cheapest for customers who go overdrawn by £500 for just five days a month, as the overdraft charge of £1 per day for debit balances under £2,500 will be covered by the £5 monthly payment the bank pays to account holders who pay in £1,000 a month. bank account £16.80.
Most expensive: Alliance & Leicester’s Premier Direct account is one of the priciest, costing £2.50 a month or £30 a year.
• Permanently overdrawn
Cheapest: Ironically Lewis Mathers might do better if his account was permanently in the red. Alliance & Leicester is one of the cheapest, costing someone in this situation £60 a year, according to Moneysupermarket.
Most expensive: Halifax’s fixed daily rate the makes it one of the most expensive, with borrowers clocking up £300 in charges.
• Accounts with buffers
Buffers allow you to go overdrawn by a small amount without incurring hefty fees. Coventry Building Society’s First Current account and First Direct’s First account both offer buffers of up to £250. The Co-operative Bank’s Current Account Plus has a £200 buffer while NatWest’s Current Plus account offers a £100 buffer.
Jill Insley
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Famous, Rich and Jobless; Jobless; Inside John Lewis; Wonders of the Solar System | TV review
Mar 14th
It’s very hard to care about minor celebrities pretending to be out of work when a documentary about real unemployed people shows how difficult it is
Of the many difficulties facing the unemployed, perhaps the most overlooked is the lack of empathy expressed by obscure celebrities. Most of us are aware of the hardship, the boredom and the social stigma suffered by the jobless. Up until now, however, few have been prepared to acknowledge that the out-of-work also have to endure not knowing if the woman who used to be married to Noel from Oasis and that Irish bloke off the gardening programme fully appreciate their plight.
To its deathless credit, Famous, Rich and Jobless was no longer willing to ignore this shameful social injustice. For if millions are going to live without the prospect of secure employment, it must surely help to know that Emma Parker Bowles recognises what they’re going through. No doubt the unemployed would argue that it would help more if they knew who Emma Parker Bowles was, but they have to accept that reality TV is very different from most contemporary job markets, in that there is an excess of work and a shortage of skilled workers.
When it comes down to it, living in a bedsit in Hartlepool or Hackney for four days and pretending to be unemployed doesn’t feature high on the list of minor celebrities’ ambitions. Your former cricket players and young soap actors are looking for their agents to secure a slot on Strictly Come Dancing or, failing that, Dancing on Ice – something with a spangly uniform and an attractive partner, who might wish to pay testament to the onetime sportsman’s sexual magnetism in an exclusive tabloid interview.
But who wants to ponce around the depressed areas of Britain looking for non-existent work? It’s the TV equivalent of cockle picking. So the economic laws of supply and demand force programme makers to recruit from a more desperate workforce, whether that means extraterrestrial, older, completely forgotten or never known. In this case it meant Parker Bowles, Larry Lamb, Meg Mathews and Diarmuid Gavin.
This game quartet was variously described as “four well-known personalities” and “four famous volunteers”. Once the mark of fame’s flexibility was that it was possible to be famous for being famous. That seems like an impossibly rigorous qualification now that the concept of fame has been stretched to include those who are famous without being famous. Let’s not quibble over the magnitude of the celebrities, though, and instead concentrate on the size of their efforts.
Sent to Hackney, Gavin, who turned out to be a TV gardener, set about pounding the streets at seven in the evening in search of employment. He inquired in several forlorn shops and takeaways, but in each place he was rebuffed. “They’re always amused that you’re looking for a job,” Gavin said after his unsuccessful search. “And the amusement comes out of embarrassment, I think, because it’s one of those taboos.”
That’s certainly one explanation. Another might be surprise that a middle-aged Irishman was out at night in Hackney seeking work in an Asian corner shop. And yet another could be a certain nervous mirth at the sight of the camera crew gathered just behind the shoulder of the garden designer.
Either way, having been quite sanguine about his prospects, by the end of the evening Gavin was emoting away before the camera like, well, a reality TV participant. According to Jobless, a documentary concerned with real unemployed people, research shows that “within just five weeks, those who lose their jobs start to experience low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and insomnia”. Within just five hours of not finding a job, Gavin reported all those symptoms. That’s what television can do to you. As a result, he completely rethought his previous views and gave impassioned voice to the bottomless frustration of the workless. Not since George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London has there been such a searing indictment of economic deprivation.
Then he went and ruined it all by finding a job the next morning. Mathews and Parker Bowles also found gainful employment with similar haste, which was impressive given that their employers had to put up with the accompanying video cameras and sound booms and TV personnel. If only the government was prepared to arrange camera crews for all job interviews, unemployment could be wiped out in a few days.
Only Larry Lamb, veteran of the legendary ferry epic Triangle, and late of Gavin and Stacey and EastEnders, refused to play the game. He didn’t bother looking for work, preferring to focus on surviving on the job-seeker allowance of a tenner a day. He ate tuna out of a can and was found by the show’s two “experts”, neither of whom was able to demonstrate their expertise, walking around on Hartlepool beach. Taken to task for not looking for work, he testily replied: “I’ve enough money to sustain me, so what’s the panic?”
The obvious answer, of course, was “the ratings!” But the experts preferred to mount the more enterprising argument that Lamb had entered into a state of denial common to many who find themselves without work. Like everything else about the programme, it was the purest nonsense. Lamb was just an actor on the lam, turning a bit-part in provincial theatre into starring role of self-discovery. He also managed to save half of his 40 quid.
The apparent lessons of Famous, Rich and Jobless are that it’s easy to find work and not difficult to live on the job-seeking allowance. As such, it was possibly the silliest and most misconceived piece of television since The Trench, the documentary that tried to recreate the horror of the first world war by getting a bunch of young men to sit around in a big muddy hole.
There was not a pseudo-celebrity to be seen in Jobless, which was only one of its commendable features. Following several families of the unemployed, this astutely made film showed the anxiety and uncertainty that are the exhaust fumes of redundancy, and did so with wit and warmth. There was a lot of quiet desperation but also some uplifting scenes of old-fashioned solidarity and familial support.
In one scene, Derek, a Scottish journalist, visited a job centre with bright surfaces and optimistic logos – “jobs for everyone”. His interviewer explained that she could input “journalist” into her computer and instantly see what work was on offer. The answer came back: “No vacancies”. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.
It seems to have been a special recession gloom week at the BBC. Inside John Lewis was a dully formulaic documentary that had little to say beyond diminished sales and reduced profits. No one wants to buy running machines any more, apparently, but there’s been a run on plastic cocktail glasses. There’s a snapshot of the British in 2010: the treadmill has ground to a halt and we’re drowning our sorrows in plastic cups.
Thank heavens for the bigger perspective offered by Wonders of the Solar System. In five billion years the sun will implode. “And when it goes,” explained Professor Brian Cox, “it really will be the end of us all.” As with everything he says, it was expressed with the breathless awe of the teenage chess prodigy who’s just been introduced to marijuana.
But perhaps we’d all sound like that if we’d been whizzed from Death Valley to the Arctic, via Varanasi in India, the Amazon and South America’s Atacama desert. If Cox does rave on a bit about the sun’s incredible power, he can’t be accused of hot air. He’s a physicist, remember: it’s solar wind.
Scene of the week
It’s a tall order to deliver on a promise of a “substantial” interview when you’re surrounded by a lilac backdrop of flowerpots and ornamental urns, but David Cameron rose to the challenge on The Alan Titchmarsh Show (ITV1). “Coronation Street or EastEnders?” asked his greenfingered inquisitor. A nation paused and the thoughts of political historians turned reflexively to the great television stand-offs of yesteryear – John Nott storming out on Robin Day or Jeremy Paxman repeating the same question to Michael Howard 12 times. This was clearly a moment of that order. The mark of a great statesman is to be able to display equanimity under intense pressure. So it was that the leader of the opposition declared an addiction to neither soap. “I like escapism,” he said, explaining his taste for Lark Rise to Candleford. When his job involves taking on “the Titch”, we can all understand why.
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Liberal Democrats start to believe that this election could be different
Mar 14th
From eternally Tory Eastbourne to the Labour heartlands of West Yorkshire, the Liberal Democrats are convinced that they can take seats off both main parties at the forthcoming general election and end up holding the balance of power in a hung parliament. Could it really happen?
Annemarie Field smiled, her pale blue eyes sparkling in the sunshine. “I always used to say that if you put a blue rosette on a cornflakes packet it would win a general election in Eastbourne. This town is Conservative.” She should know, having worked for the town’s two local papers since 1985. But this year might be different.
Eastbourne is one of the top target seats for the Liberal Democrats, who are determined to overturn a Tory majority of 1,124. Field described the party’s campaigners as an army of “yellow ants” marching through the streets. With two months to go, they are delivering 45,000 leaflets and 25,000 targeted letters every fortnight. Their candidate, Stephen Lloyd, will knock on 2,000 more doors before 6 May.
“We don’t have multimillion-pound donations from Lord Ashcroft or the unions,” said Danny Alexander, the MP who chairs the group in charge of the party’s manifesto. But the Lib Dems appear to have something else: an unprecedented ability to organise locally.
That is what they are doing against the Tories in the south – and against Labour, largely in the north. It is a geographical spread which brings accusations that the party changes its message to suit its audience.
In this seaside town, the Lib Dems’ focus has been car parking – and, in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, on the sitting Tory MP’s second home.
“The Lib Dems are desperate for Eastbourne,” said Field, walking into the newspapers’ main office. “If I was a gambling person I wouldn’t know who to put my money on,” she said to a male colleague. He swung his chair round to face her and nodded. “In fact, I might put my money on Stephen Lloyd,” he said. “Me too,” boomed another, raising his arm.
It is not only in Eastbourne where the Liberal Democrats are increasingly optimistic. At their party’s spring conference in Birmingham this weekend, the same conversations could be heard in the hallways, the restaurants and the bars. There was talk of whether the party could gain from public fury about expenses; debate about how the words “hung parliament” had thrown the party into the news like never before; chatter about whether Nick Clegg could exploit his role as equal player in the three televised leaders’ debates.
By yesterday many were daring to consider the question: could the 2010 general election be a turning point? They were boosted by the news that Edward McMillan-Scott, a former Tory MEP who once headed the party’s grouping in Brussels, had joined the party.
Then there was the rallying call from their leader. “On Monday morning I want you to get out there and go for broke in what will be the biggest fight of our political lives,” he told delegates, who rose to their feet and roared in appreciation. It all sounded good, but then again hadn’t they heard it all before? Wasn’t it much more likely that the activists dressed in yellow would wake up on the morning of 7 May disappointed again?
Some disagreed. “I think this election is starting to look different,” said Olly Grender, a former party director of communications who worked with Paddy Ashdown. “What is uniquely interesting is the strength of feeling that it is time for a change, and the same strength of opinion that David Cameron is not the embodiment of that change. That creates an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats.”
Grender said the televised debates were vital. The fact that broadcasters, and in particular the BBC, were taking the party seriously would create a “ripple effect”. Then there was the “hung parliament scenario”, which Grender called a “double-edged sword”. It made the party relevant but also raised fears among voters of its economic dangers.
“I headed the media in 1992 and anyone involved in that campaign came out deeply scarred,” said Grender, as he recalled the “absolute certainty” with which pollsters predicted a hung parliament in the exit polls and the “absolute nonsense” that proved to be the cold light of day.
Grender said it was “critical” that Clegg was not drawn on the issue. On Friday he wasn’t. On stage, he referred to “you know what”, baiting journalists looking for any sign that he was ready to make a pact. Clegg lifted up his red tie, then smiled and pulled open his jacket to reveal a blue lining.
Today he will tell delegates in his conference speech that it is for the public to decide. “I am not a kingmaker. The 45 million voters of Britain are the kingmakers. They give the politicians their marching orders, not the other way around. It’s called democracy,” he will say.
Clegg says his party is interested in promoting its four main areas of policy focus: tax, education, cleaner politics and the financial crisis. Nevertheless, fears emerged among left-of-centre delegates at the weekend that he would get too close to Cameron .
Yesterday evening MPs and others gathered for a fringe meeting to formally launch the Social Liberal Forum – a pressure group committed to “reinventing the left” in Britain. Some admitted they were uneasy about the notion of a Tory-Lib Dem pact.
Clegg had aimed to reassure delegates by clarifying comments that appeared to support the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. “I violently opposed and was hostile to pretty well everything she did,” he said.
But Grender argued most delegates would not put themselves on the left-right political spectrum. “There is a strength of philosophy and it is liberalism.”
Many people spoke at conference about what was happening outside, on the streets of Birmingham, through Yorkshire and into Newcastle, across Cambridge, London and into the south-west. Tim Farron, who is defending a majority of only 267 in Cumbria, told delegates that the Lib Dems had to deliver 10 times more leaflets that their rivals just to be heard. In a rousing speech, the MP compared the campaign to a football match in its final five minutes.
John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said he had seen activists in action in his own constituency and “boy, are they fighting for it”. But he also introduced a dose of realism, saying that the national polls suggested the party was “indestructible yet uninflatable”. That said, the key to the general election could be the Lib Dem-Tory marginals, he said. The results there could determine whether or not Cameron won his much-yearned-for majority.
In Eastbourne, seagulls flocked above the union flag flapping in the wind over the station, beside neat, landscaped gardens which run parallel to the beach and above rows of well-kept, sizeable homes. At 100 Seaside Road last week, the windows were filled with yellow and orange posters. Four volunteers sat inside the front room rhythmically picking up leaflets and stuffing them into envelopes.
This war room has been active for years, not months, funded by Lloyd and a large number of relatively small donations. The candidate’s message is persistently local: his three top issues are a campaign against a parking scheme, a fight to save a local college and policing.
As one of the writers at the Eastbourne Herald claimed: “You can’t win in Eastbourne with Lib Dem policies.” And Lloyd’s team were having “field day” attacking the local Tory MP, he added, largely because it had emerged that Nigel Waterson’s children went to school near a home he owns miles away in Beckenham, Kent.
“I live locally, I shop locally, I know the issues that people experience every day because I experience them too,” said Lloyd, repeating the mantra he has used to the people of Eastbourne.
The other message repeated again and again was that only the Lib Dems could beat the Tories in Eastbourne. Lloyd, whose own roots are in the Labour party, said he was grateful for the votes Labour supporters might bring.
The Tory response is to stress the other side of the equation. “The question that matters in this is election is whether people want five more years of Gordon Brown or David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats do not feature in that,” said Waterson. He criticised Lloyd’s campaign as “particularly nasty and personal” and warned it could backfire.
But if the question for the Lib Dems in affluent towns in the south-west is how to persuade Labour supporters to back their assault on a Tory incumbent, how can it challenge Labour in some of the most deprived wards in the country? Does it cynically change its message to boost its chance of election?
Bradford East is another seat the Lib Dems are desperate to secure – this time by seizing it from the Labour MP, Terry Rooney. In 2005 it wasn’t a target. The candidate, David Ward, remembers the “battle bus” flying straight past his office on its way to Leeds North West. “But this time it will stop,” he said. “The party is relentless with target seats.”
Ward’s constituency was added to the list two years ago and since then central office has demanded monthly updates about the number of leaflets and letters dispatched and doorsteps trodden. Clegg has already visited a number of times.
Ward drove his car around the constituency to demonstrate its diversity. He passed through the attractive cottages at the northern tip, before turning in to one of the most deprived estates in the country. Some of the houses lay deserted with huge metal plates hauled up over windows and doors. At others the gates had fallen off their hinges.
The estates gave way to Bradford Moor, where shops such as Sana Fabrics, Ahmed Foods, Nangla Furniture and Akbar’s lined the streets. In Bradford East half the children were on free school meals, there were five big working-class estates and in the poorest ward a child was five more times likely to die than in Ilkley, an affluent spa town outside the city, said Jeanette Sunderland, the leader of the Lib Dems on the local council and Ward’s campaign manager.
Sitting back into her chair in the campaign headquarters, she flung her hand up towards a map of the sausage-shaped constituency, colour-coded by deprivation. “That means poverty,” she said, sweeping her hand over the lower half of the map, which was red. “And no one lives up there,” she said, pointing to the smaller area of blue.
Behind Sunderland stood a flip chart on which were written four key policies for the Lib Dems. “We take the complex national messages and we explain why they matter to you in Bradford East,” she said. “The £10,000 personal income tax allowance will benefit everyone, while the mansion tax on homes worth more than £2m will hit no one. There are no millionaires in this constituency. There isn’t a house worth £1m, never mind £2m. And the pupil premium to target the most deprived school students will bring in £12m.”
Here too, leaflets are being printed in the thousands. And it is an example of another way that the Lib Dems target areas – starting with a council seat, then another, until they have a ward, then two, then more. Finally, as is now the case in Bradford East, they throw all their energy into securing an MP.
Here too there is leaflet after leaflet reminding voters that there is one party that can’t win: this time, it’s the Tories.
Both Sunderland and Ward rejected the claim that the Lib Dems changed their message to suit the town. Sunderland said it was about talking about the parts of the message that were relevant . “In Little Horton ward in Bradford there is no point talking about tax – most are on benefits,” she said. Electoral reform was a non-issue in Bradford, especially for families where the decision was whether to eat or warm their houses.
Ward claimed disillusionment was rife in Bradford East. To prove his point promised that the first person he asked would not know the name of their local MP. He was right. “I haven’t got a clue,” she said in a strong local accent, laughing. Mubarak Khan, a 42-year-old taxi driver, said he had always backed Labour but now wouldn’t bother voting at all. “They promise and don’t deliver – on education, health, transport, even policing. I won’t be voting.”
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Iraq security firm joins bidding for Wall Street’s favourite detective agency
Mar 14th
Control Risks poised to table £600m bid for US corporate investigations company Kroll
Control Risks, which provides security for foreign companies in Iraq and the British government, is poised to join the bidding war for Wall Street’s favourite detective agency, Kroll.
The security firm, headed by Richard Fenning, is linking with US private equity firm General Atlantic to table a £600m bid. Additional firepower for the bid could come from British private equity group 3i, which has a 17% stake in Control Risks.
Control Risks was founded in 1975 by former army officer Timothy Royle to provide advice to insurer Hogg Robinson after a spate of kidnappings of company executives in the US and Europe by political extremists. It became independent in 1982 and offers advice on the political, economic and logistical risks of doing business abroad as well as providing crisis-management services. A large contract with the British government for work in Iraq accounted for 30% of its sales in 2008.
The firm has more than 1,000 employees in 15 countries and performs vetting, provides bodyguards and carries out anti-stalking measures for high-profile individuals. The majority of its clients are large corporations that need political and security risk assessments.
Control Risks rose to prominence in 1997 when it produced video evidence of senior Co-operative Wholesale Society executives passing information about the group to British entrepreneur Andrew Regan ahead of his planned bid for the business. But it has also grown on the back of the increase in global mergers and acquisitions activity and rising use of technology in the workplace.
“Investigating technology-based fraud and providing political and economic analysis for entrants to a particular market remains its stock in trade,” said one security analyst.
Kroll is best known for helping to uncover the hidden assets of Saddam Hussein, and for proving that the death of “God’s banker”, Roberto Calvi, found hanging from London’s Blackfriars bridge in 1982, was not suicide.
In the early 1980s, Kroll started investigating corporate raiders such as Sir James Goldsmith and Victor Posner on behalf of the companies they were attacking. During the 1990s, it also gained attention for its success in searching for assets hidden by dictators Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines.
Following the 11 September attacks in 2001 and a rash of corporate scandals during the early part of the decade – which reinforced the message that companies and investors needed to carry out proper due diligence – Kroll and other corporate security groups were in increasing demand.
However, Kroll has seen many twists and turns in its history as it pursued expansion and diversification into other areas such as computer security, forensic accounting, data recovery, employee screening and restructuring.
Kroll has offices in 33 countries and employs more than 3,800 people. By 1987, it had established a reputation as Wall Street’s pre-eminent private eye during hostile takeovers, after being hired to look into the new breed of financiers and their novel means of raising money. Kroll was hired by the Sears Tower in Chicago to review security after 9/11 and took the job of restructuring Enron, the energy firm brought down by fraud in 2001.
City sources say Control Risks and General Atlantic face fierce competition for Kroll from three American private equity bidders – Carlyle, Apax and BC Partners – with the latter teaming up with restructuring expert David Buchler. Control Risks declined to comment.
Kroll has been put up for auction by parent company Marsh & McLennan, the global insurance broker and consultancy company which acquired the firm from founder Jules Kroll in 2004 for nearly $2bn.
Carlyle is viewed as a leading contender for the business as it has historically had a strong focus on the defence and security sectors. Former prime minister John Major was once a member of its board. But General Atlantic has deep pockets – the firm has approximately $15bn (£9.8bn) of capital under management and is among the 50 largest private equity firms globally.
Analysts say that the increasing complexity of the financial markets, globalisation and the internet have presented new security challenges for companies, meaning increased opportunities for firms such as Kroll and Control Risks.
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Brad the builder in New Orleans | Rowan Moore
Mar 14th
After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Brad Pitt called in the world’s top architects for his acclaimed Make It Right project. The plan was to build green homes to replace those destroyed in New Orleans. Now the first houses are up and inhabited… so is it just a celebrity ego trip or a true regeneration?
Debra Dupar, pregnant with her fifth child, is sitting outside her new house. She is washed by the noon sun of an early spring day, nursing a pinkish-red drink and chatting to her friends. A short way off a camera crew is setting up, assessing shots, squinting at the light, chatting to potential interviewees. They are working for Spike Lee, who is making a documentary about the place where Debra lives.
A guided tour of about a dozen people tramps along the vestigial street, marked out by some sinewy evergreen oaks, or “live oaks” as they are called here. Two men, self-consciously dressed – architects, probably – get out of a maroon taxi, scan the scene, sweep it with camcorders, say to each other: “OK, I’m good”, get back in the taxi and go, all in about 60 seconds. And then the man from the London Observer wants to look inside Debra’s house.
Brad Pitt had warned residents of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth ward that “we would be turning their neighbourhood into a circus”. He was referring to the Pink Project, an “art installation/political messaging device/fundraising tool” in 2007, when hundreds of pink fabric house-shapes were scattered about the site, ghosts of houses that had been and which would return. Now, with 23 houses newly built, it remains a circus, a vortex of disaster and celebrity from which media and sightseers can’t stay away. For this spot is the location of Make It Right, the project launched by Pitt in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to which he has pledged $5m. Its aim is not only to rebuild at least 150 homes in the spot worst hit by the storm and its floods but to “turn tragedy into victory”, as the actor put it, and to “offer a more humane building standard… We would create homes that were sustainable and build with clean building materials for a just quality of life… We would build for safety and storm resiliency. We’d create new jobs in the process and we wouldn’t stop until we could achieve all of this affordably.” To show he was serious he moved his family home to New Orleans, and joined in long and gritty community meetings about the best way forward.
“We’d call upon some of our great architectural minds to innovate these solutions,” he said, and create “a template that could be replicated at the macro level. We would engage and rely on the community to define the function of their neighbourhood and adhere to their guidance, protecting New Orleans’s rich culture.” If the people of the Lower Ninth had been betrayed by professionals, by the engineers whose levees had failed in over 50 places, if “the most sickening thought is that this all could have been avoided”, Pitt’s mission was to “take what was wrong and make it right”.
These were stirring words, born of a celebrity’s stricken social conscience but also of the love of architecture Pitt had displayed before Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. He befriended the likes of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. He had spent time in their studios, especially Gehry’s, trying his hand at designing buildings himself.
It was a heroic project, and one that raised questions. How much would it really be about helping victims of Katrina, and how much would it be about making Pitt feel and look good? What would the star of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button truly know about urban regeneration?
What would “our great architectural minds”, whose work is usually to design luxury items such as iconic museums and private villas, know about the hard practicalities of sustainable
low-income housing? Narcissism and charity are often close companions, perhaps inevitably, but would Make It Right be more a case of the former or the latter? And, in the aftermath of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, are there any lessons from New Orleans for rebuilding there?
On 29 August 2005, the spot where Debra is now sitting was one of the worst places to be on earth. The horizon behind her is formed by the pale band of the infamous levee, essentially a long concrete wall, now rebuilt twice as thick and twice as high as its predecessor, and with basic precautions against undermining that weren’t there before. The original levee was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers following Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and was supposed to keep out the waters of the adjoining Industrial Canal, which links the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain. When Katrina forced volumes of water up the canal, the levee suffered multiple breaches.
The streets nearest the levee were the worst hit. I meet Gloria, a woman in late middle age who had to get from the roof of her house on to another, and then into an oak, where she waited for nine and a half hours until her rescue. “Without that tree I’d have been dead,” she says.
A few doors further along stands the rebuilt house of Robert Green. Its flagpole rises out of a granite tablet, beside it some damaged statuettes of saints, commemorating Joyce Green, 1931 to 2005, and Shanat Green, 2002 to 2005. The latter was lifted on to the roof by her grandfather, who then turned to help his other grandchild up. When he turned back to Shanat, she had vanished. What happened to Joyce???Outside a nearby trailer, a tableau of wreathes and writing proclaims rage and hope: “We want our country to love us as much as we love our country. The strength of our country belongs to us all. Mr Bush, rebuild – New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward, Cross the Canal, Tennessee Street. NOT IRAQ.” Then a later text: “Obama: A New Era of Responsibility”.
The floods spread throughout the Lower Ninth, an almost all-black district with a population of 14,000. Over 1,000 of the more than 1,800 deaths caused by Katrina were in this district, and since then spiking rates of suicide and heart failure indicate further victims. This area is still the most visibly devastated. The picturesque parts of New Orleans, such as the French Quarter and the Garden District, were built on higher ground and were least affected, and now bear little or no trace of damage. The prettily porched and painted houses of Bywater, a former working-class area on the other side of the canal from the Lower Ninth, are now colonised by artists and designers. Young creative types have been moving into New Orleans since the flood, drawn by low property prices, sympathy, and the poignant glamour of disaster.
Much of the Lower Ninth, by contrast, is wilderness. Big vacant oblongs that were once city blocks sprout weeds between the concrete slabs which are all that are left of the wooden houses that stood here. Some poignant short flights of brick steps remain. Files of telegraph poles still stand, marking out the blocks but serving nothing. Occasionally a bright new house stands out.
Some houses still exist as ruins, boarded up or with doors swinging open. Some carry spray-painted X’s, put there by rescuers in the days following Katrina. In the quadrants of each X are indicated, according to a code in use at the time, the number of people found in each house, alive and dead, and the number of pets, alive and dead. Other homes are being laboriously restored by their inhabitants. They have been partly helped by the Road Home programme, a federal compensation plan, which has often proved inadequate and slow moving. Two men, one lean and grey-whiskery, the other in a many-holed black T-shirt, tell me their repair work proceeds “paycheck by paycheck”. Straight after the flood, many wondered aloud if it wouldn’t be better just to give up on New Orleans. Its population was already in decline, from 625,000 in 1960 to 450,000 in 2005. All but a few thousand were temporarily evacuated across the United States, to safer places. The luckier ones would get insurance cheques. Why would they want to come back? “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” said Dennis Hastert (Republican, Illinois), the then Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Yet New Orleans didn’t die, proof, perhaps, that cities are more than functional conveniences. They inspire affection, emotional ties and loyalty. It is now the fastest growing city in the United States, at 7-8% per year, even if, at about 340,000, it is still below pre-Katrina levels. If people persist in living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles and San Francisco, why would they not return to New Orleans?
This renewal is despite, more than thanks to, the efforts of the city’s government. New Orleans has suffered from what the New York Times called the “dysfunctional stalemate that has bogged down the city’s recovery”. The dysfunction is both between black and white populations and between city and federal government, and the consequence is that swathes of the place are still visibly ruined, and homeless rates remain high. Recently a tide of frustration swept a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, to power with 66% of the vote, but he has yet to take office.
In the nearly five years since the storm, a “recovery plan” was drawn up, often reviewed, and barely implemented. The city, according to one involved in reconstruction, “has hundreds of millions of dollars committed but not spent”. The recovery plan was created “without a drop of sense as to what was implementable”.
One of the most visible government interventions into housing has been to demolish hundreds of decent, solid, brick homes, built for the poor under the New Deal. The stated aim was to create a more “mixed income” neighbourhood – that is, a higher income neighbourhood – but destroying serviceable houses is not what New Orleans needs.
Into the vacuum of action created by government, individuals and independent agencies have piled in. Self-organised groups that have grown up since 2005 have become significant forces of renewal. For example, one band of survivors in the Lower Ninth got together, commandeered their local Martin Luther King school, and got it reopened. The authorities had been planning on keeping it closed.
Habitat for Humanity, an international charity, has built more than 1,300 “simple, decent, and affordable homes” in the four states affected by Hurricane Katrina and her nasty little sister Rita, which followed shortly after. Another not-for-profit organisation, Global Green, is building a development of exemplary levels of sustainability in Holy Cross, the area of the Lower Ninth that was least badly affected (which was still quite bad enough) by the flooding. Global Green is also advising individual home owners on sustainable ways to rebuild their homes, and is campaigning for high environmental standards in new schools. Bob Tannen, a New Orleans-based urban planner, engineer and artist, has worked with Frank Gehry to devise the “Modgun” house, an updated version of the area’s traditional “shotgun house”, with a long, narrow timber-framed structure which could be extended as their owners acquired the means to do so.
The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, an independently-governed public agency, says it is achieving “500-1,000″ residential sales a year, and 300,000 sq ft of commercial spaces. Its director of real estate strategy Ommeed Sathe, a young, fluent and persuasive lawyer from New York, says: “We’re working to the city’s plan but we’re better than them at implementing it.” He blames slow progress on the bureaucratic procedures that government, but not his agency, have to follow: “If they want to spend a dollar they have to obey about 30 regulations… It’s about as hard to buy a stapler as it is to buy a school.”
Brad Pitt’s project is therefore neither the biggest, nor the speediest, nor the most prolific (in terms of units built) of the reconstruction efforts. There’s a certain rivalry between the different people pushing New Orleans’s physical recovery, and those outside Make It Right tend to speak with a combination of gratitude for the attention that the film star has brought to their issues and envy for the attention that he draws to his own project. He was first introduced to the field through a connection with Global Green and, although the latter organisation is too polite to say so, you sense that they would rather he had lent his pulling power to their projects than branching off on his own.
Make It Right’s USP is design. Its houses would not only be built (as Global Green’s are) to exemplary standards of sustainability and flood protection. They would not only use construction techniques that would use 30% less timber than conventional methods. They would also have whatever added magic outstanding architects could bring. A team of 21 architects was assembled, with GRAFT, a practice based in both Los Angeles and Berlin, being one of the first to get involved, and a local firm, Williams Architects, as executive architects. The architects included the Pritzker prize-winning Morphosis from Los Angeles, the provocative Dutch firm MVRDV, and Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect whose reputation is based on the usual array of intriguing cultural projects and private houses but also on his emergency cardboard constructions, designed in response to the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
There were the celebrated British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, Elemental from Chile, Constructs LLC from Ghana, and the Philadelphia firm of Kieran Timberlake, who have just been announced as the architects of the new US Embassy in London. There were also less famous practices from nearer to the Lower Ninth: five from New Orleans and others from Texas and Missouri. All work without payment: “Their work and designs are a donation to the residents of the Lower Ninth ward and society as a whole,” as GRAFT puts it.
Designs were based on guidelines derived from traditional New Orleans types. Porches to shelter from sun and rain, almost ubiquitous in this city, should be included. The architects produced 28 prototype designs in two “presentations”. Residents could choose which type they wanted, and could customise them. They could, for example, decide how high off the ground they wanted to be. Most went for as high as possible, not only to stand above future floods but also to allow room to park cars underneath.
These houses were for people who had owned homes before the storm and now had little property left but rectangles of mud. (Although poor, the Lower Ninth had been one of the first places where African-Americans could buy homes, and had high rates of home ownership.) The deal was that families had to “expose their finances” and “put forward what they could afford”. The gap between that and the actual cost of construction would be covered by a “forgivable loan”, to be repaid only if they sold their houses on.
The result is an array of similar-but-different houses, with bright colours and unusual angles denoting different authorships. Debra Dupar’s house is, she tells me, called the “Space House”, on account of the futuristic swoop of its louvred sunshade, and she is quite happy with that. Inside, her house is more simple, with a decent, well-proportioned front room dominated by a big flat-screen TV, a fish tank, and a table ornament that spells HAPPINESS in thick bronze-coloured letters. Not that design is the main issue for her: she spent four years in a trailer-home in Simmesport, Louisiana, 150 miles away, and, even though she is paying for her home, she is happy to be back. The residents did not, as might have been expected, opt for the most conservative or traditional-looking designs, but it’s fair to say that the most convincing homes tend to be by the less starry architects. The only type no one wanted was MVRDV’s, in which a traditional house-shape appears to have been snapped into a giant V by an invisible karate chop or natural disaster. The V contains a clever internal arrangement of split levels, but it still looked too much like a bad joke to victims of Katrina.
Morphosis put much of their own time and money into a house which, using Dutch techniques, would float in the event of flood, with two metal poles preventing it from drifting away. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that the architect’s styling is so overwrought, with so many odd angles and assertive details, that it would be an oppressive place to inhabit.
One of the more convincing structures is the Mobile Goat Unit of Operation Slo-Mow, designed by students at New Orleans’s Tulane university. This is a wheeled trailer containing goats, who are released to keep surrounding grass under control. Apparently this method is more cost-effective and environmental than hiring men with mowing machines.
It’s not always obvious what the architects’ gestures add to the project, as distinct from the more practical stuff about sustainability (which lowers residents’ utilities bills), flood protection, and more efficient ways of building. According to Ommeed Sathe: “People look at Make It Right and see it as whimsical and nonsensical… There’s also a criticism that for that amount of money you could have made 500 homes.” But: “I think it has added value. You get 10 to 12 tour buses a day in an area where there was very little redevelopment energy.” It has “also served as a massive R&D project”, pioneering techniques and developing skills in contractors that can now be applied elsewhere.
Louis Jackson, a forthright contractor working on Make It Right, says something similar. “The challenging part,” he says, is getting architects “to realise they’re not designing a $5m mansion. Some of the guys have been closed-minded. They’d say, ‘I’m the designer, I am the king and you do it my way.’ But if you think about the big picture of it – and I have to do that sometimes to keep my sanity – it’s a learning process, and we are much better today than we were a year ago.”
Jackson hasn’t made money on the project but he is far from regretting his involvement. “It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s something you think about all the time.” It is also a “reputation-builder”, and something that teaches him things he can use on other projects. “The third time we build something we should be getting pretty close to how it should be,” he says.
The question also remains why they rebuilt on this exact spot. If you look at a map of New Orleans with a cold eye, it seems logical to return the Lower Ninth ward, which is below sea level, to uninhabited wetlands, and to rehouse its former citizens in the many gaps in higher, relatively safe parts of the city. No one is very confident that the place won’t get flooded again, despite the improved levees. “If anything serious comes through, like another category 5 hurricane, we’re going to get washed away again,” says one resident. Bob Tannen, who worked for the city on building their roads, says: “The levee is now designed for another Katrina, but what happens if it is worse than Katrina?”
But cold logic overlooks the detail that, for low-income homeowners, their plots in the flood zone were the only property they had left, as well as the fact that the political will and mechanisms to attempt wholesale relocation were wholly lacking. It ignores the fact that the Lower Ninth was not just a statistical unit but a place of memories and associations for New Orleans’s black communities. The pianist Fats Domino refused to live anywhere else until Katrina forced him out of his mansion. The common sense of building only above sea level would also mean evacuating much of the Netherlands.
It’s also fair to say that this site offered the most scope for Brad Pitt to strut his charitable stuff. The worst part of the worst affected district gave the best stage for a dramatic transformation, and actors are in the habit of looking for the best stage. Make It Right is not without ego, on the part of either Pitt or his architects. If one thing is to be learned from the project, whether in Chile, Haiti, or in building further houses in New Orleans, it would be to recruit a smaller crew of architects, and get them to focus more tightly on what really does constitute the best possible home in places like this.
Only a miserable churl, however, could fail to be moved by the scene Make It Right now offers. It has turned devastation and misery into something hopeful, and there is an energy about the place that other post-Katrina reconstruction projects don’t offer. The show-off architecture does its bit, too, in adding to the festivity of the place. Also as a sign that someone could be bothered.
It may be that Brad’s model village has a touch of the Hollywood vanity project but I can think of very many much worse ways to use celebrity and influence.
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