Put the basement bounders in the stocks
JEREMY LEWIS is enraged by the expansionist mega-rich house-owners
BACK IN THE early Seventies, Ted Heath got into hot water when he made a Cabinet minister of John Davies, a businessman with no experience of politics. The whole thing proved a disaster, but it was an early example of the notion, all too prevalent nowadays and enthusiastically advanced by management consultants and headhunters, that the well-qualified manager can turn his hand to anything, and make a better job of it than those who have spent their lives in a particular business or profession.
Take, for example, Andy Hornby, the former boss of HBOS. After Oxford and the obligatory MBA from Harvard, he worked for an American management consultancy, for cement maker Blue Circle Industries and for Asda before moving via the Halifax Building Society to HBOS – where, according to Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, he showed ‘more interest in what type of canned music was playing in the branches than the riskiness of the loan book’. After making the most fearful balls-up as a banker, as a result of which his bank had to be bailed out by the tax-payer, he moved on to the Gala Coral Group, which runs betting shops, bingo halls and casinos: his natural habitat, perhaps. ance, gone for ever. Fining the mega-rich is a futile business: I long for the stocks to be reintroduced so that house-owners with more money than sense can be subjected to a deluge of rotten veg, hurled by the infuriated inhabitants of Barnes. In the meantime, couldn’t the law be changed before London is undermined and irremediably ruined? One of the great pleasures of last year was polishing off the fourth and last volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters. Rightly admired in his lifetime, the Oxford sage has come in for a bollocking since his death in 1997. He has been ridiculed as an arch-ditherer and fence-sitter, forever changing his mind, saying one thing to one person and something very different to another, and rubbishing old friends behind their backs. In this he sounds not so very different from the rest of us; nor did he ever claim to be a man of rigidly consistent views.
Much of what Berlin wrote is above my brow level, but apart from being a marvellous gossip – he was, his denigrators claim, far too keen on consorting with the grand and the famous – he consistently advanced two beliefs which should be born in mind in these troubled times. The first was an abhorrence of all-explaining systems of belief, whether religious, philosophical or – worst of all – political: he believed that they invariably lead to intolerance and worse, to hideous crimes being committed on the grounds that the ends justify the means, and that omelettes can’t be made without breaking eggs. The second is that good and desirable ends – freedom and equality, justice and security – are all too often incompatible, as a result of which compromises must be made. As he often said, quoting Kant, ‘From the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.’ He was a wise old bird and, if his letters are anything to go by, very lovable as well. I’m haunted by the old adage about the devil having the best tunes. The Nazis’ most famous song, the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ – composed in honour of a Brownshirt thug and pimp, killed by the Communists in 1930 – has an infuriatingly attractive and contagious tune, as do many of the other Nazi songs one hears when watching telly documentaries about the rise of Hitler. In between Eton and Oxford, the young David Astor – the future editor of the Observer – spent time in Germany in the years before Hitler’s accession to power, and much as he hated what the Nazis stood for, he found himself inadvertently humming along to their songs. Needless to say, I’ve never watched an Isis recruiting video, but if the odd snippets overheard on the news are anything to go by, they share Goebbels’s faith in the efficacy of a good tune. What devilishly seductive things they are.