The Good, the Bad and the Greedy: Why We've Lost Faith in Capitalism

By Martin Vander Weyer

"Timely, thoughtful and witty" – Merryn Somerset Webb
From the Industrial Revolution to the internet, capitalism has been a great engine of human progress. But now it stands accused of allowing the greedy few to run riot over the rest of society, exploiting workers and suppliers and recklessly damaging the planet in pursuit of profit. Where did these accusations come from – and are they true?
In this lively critique, Spectator business editor Martin Vander Weyer argues that capitalism has indeed lost its moral compass, has lost public trust and is in urgent need of repair.
But this is no far-left analysis seeking to champion a thinly veiled Marxist platform. Written from the point of view of a deep admirer of entrepreneurship and private-sector investment as a proven path to innovation and prosperity, The Good, the Bad and the Greedy argues that businesses always operate in a social context and that a 'good' business in a moral sense can also, in a perfect world, be a business that richly rewards its creators and backers.
From the writer whom Boris Johnson called 'the most oracular and entertaining business commentator' in London, this thoughtful critique of 21st-century capitalism formulates core principles that separate the good from the bad and the greedy and warns that the system must be reformed and faith in it restored – before the next generation commit the ultimate act of self-harm by rejecting capitalism in favour of something worse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785907289

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor and columnist of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph. He has been writing about business, entrepreneurship and social change throughout the national press since 1992, after a career in international banking. His previous books include Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank (2000); Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph (2006); Fortune’s Spear (2011), the biography of 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan; and Any Other Business: Life In and Out of the City (2014), a semi-autobiographical collection of his journalism. He lives in London.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

EPIPHANY IN SEATTLE

In November 2018 – in that carefree, pre-pandemic era of frequent international travel – I had the great pleasure of visiting the handsome city of Seattle in the American north-west. I was attending the annual conference of a fellowship which brings talkative Britons and Americans together to debate topics of mutual interest, and of which I’m a long-standing member. Before arrival, conference participants were asked to select one of a choice of tours that would take place during the first afternoon.

There were several possibilities attractive to anyone like me who thinks deeply about the pros and cons of capitalism. The list included a visit to the headquarters of the software giant Microsoft, one of the great change-making corporations of the digital age. Alternative destinations included the medical laboratories of a charity called PATH that is richly funded by the foundation endowed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his now ex-wife Melinda. Or the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence founded by Gates’s original business partner, Paul Allen. Or Boeing Field, home of the great aircraft manufacturer that symbolises an earlier era of American global corporate power. Or the headquarters of Amazon, the world’s biggest and most influential online retailer, for a discussion of ‘e-commerce and the digital future’.

From this panorama of capitalism and its societal effects, I chose the Amazon option because as both a regular customer and a frequent journalistic critic of this extraordinary business, I was, to use a modern term, ‘conflicted’ about it. I wanted to understand more about its ethos – a vitally important concept to which I shall return later in this book, as my analysis of modern capitalism crystallises, I hope, into a relatively simple set of conclusions.

What was it that intrigued me, then and now, about Amazon as a business model? On the positive side, I love the convenience of being able to buy almost anything, including just about every book ever published, via Amazon’s trustworthy one-click payment and Prime delivery system. Rarely a week goes by when I don’t buy something on the site, sometimes within a few seconds of first thinking of doing so.

Rare also would be the week, especially during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 that none of us ever imagined were coming, when I did not watch films and television shows on Amazon’s Prime Video service, which felt like a free bonus on top of this new mode of ultra-convenient armchair consumerism. And I see other things to admire about Amazon beyond my personal experience of it, including the fact that it has nurtured thousands of smaller online businesses by allowing third-party vendors to use its Marketplace platform. Though I’m no one’s idea of a serious techie, I’m also aware that Amazon’s web services arm provides cloud computing capacity for a vast number of other businesses, and I assume that must be a good thing.

On the negative side, I have long disapproved of Amazon’s much-headlined practice of paying as little tax as it could, within the applicable law, wherever it operated. I found something distasteful about reports, current in 2019, that it had obliged cities competing to be the site of its second US headquarters (the eventual winner was Arlington, Virginia) to outbid each other in terms of tax and regulatory breaks. I worried that its competitive strength and discounted prices had ruined many small booksellers and other bricks-and-mortar retailers that used to be part of the social fabric of every town and suburb. I didn’t much like what I’d heard about its hollowed-out employment practices or its secretive and authoritarian internal culture.

And having read a great deal about its founder Jeff Bezos (who at that time had recently challenged Bill Gates for the title of the richest man in the world, with a net worth of more than $100 billion), I did not think I would warm to him in the unlikely event that I was offered an interview as part of my tour. In that pre-judgement I was influenced by Brad Stone’s 2013 history of Amazon, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which paints Bezos as a difficult boss, a perfectionist obsessed with technical detail who deals harshly with underperformers, who is not notably generous to loyal and efficient staff, and who is prone to tantrums known in the company as ‘nutters’.

‘If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I’ll take conflict every time,’ he has famously declared. ‘It always yields a better result.’

Though in February 2020 Bezos would commit to giving $10 billion to climate change causes, he had not previously begun to establish a reputation as a Gates-style world-scale philanthropist to counterbalance his first public image as, to put it crudely, a capitalist monster. Rather, he gave the impression in that earlier phase of not really knowing what to do with the humungous fortune that was daily accruing to him as a result of the upward trajectory of Amazon’s share price. Given the complexity and expense of the parting he had recently announced from his wife of twenty-five years, MacKenzie Scott, he did not even particularly seem to enjoy the possession of it. Nevertheless, it might have been fun to glimpse his gleaming bald head in the executive elevator.

All was well set for the visit. The conference badge on a lanyard round my neck said ‘Amazon Tour’ below my name. When the moment came, after our opening plenary session in Seattle’s landmark Space Needle, I formed up alongside the member of our fellowship who announced herself as the leader of the Amazon visit. Her day job was as one of Amazon’s army of intellectual property lawyers and in her defence, it’s fair to say that tour-guiding was probably not a task she was often asked to do, or to which she was naturally suited.

But she had equipped herself with a clipboard for the occasion and was briskly calling out the names of fellows who had signed on for her tour. I realised later that she had not called my name – but I was standing right next to her wearing my badge, I’m a well-known face in our fellowship, and I must have assumed, if I thought about it at all, that she had already ticked me off.

Whatever. Chatting amiably, we strolled several blocks in autumn sunshine to the Amazon campus at South Lake Union, where (I later read) more than 45,000 employees occupy some 13 million square feet of office space in multiple tower blocks. At the reception desk we were required to show our passports before being ushered into what are properly known as the Amazon Spheres but locally referred to, in honour of the founder, as ‘Jeff’s Balls’. Reflecting Bezos’s almost superhuman reputation as a business-builder, there are three of these structures rather than the big pair you might expect: a trio of geodesic domes at the centre of the campus, heavily planted with exotic vegetation and providing a flexible workspace-cum-meetingarea for employees and their visitors.

Here we were handed over to a ‘Sphere hostess’ – plump, heavily made-up and neatly uniformed – who had committed her script to memory and who might, if this had been a movie, have unzipped her head to reveal that she was a robot.

‘You may photograph the foliage but you may not touch it,’ was her first pronouncement.

Mischievously I said, ‘Thank you – but which way is the tax department? And can you tell me how many people work there?’

To which she replied robotically, ‘I cannot give you that information, sir.’

‘OK, but is Mr Bezos in the building today? Might we have an opportunity to ask him some questions?’

She was evidently programmed – like Amazon’s Alexa, the hot-selling voice-activated ‘virtual assistant’ home entertainment system – to duck that one too. ‘I cannot give you that information, sir.’

And on we went. There were about fifteen of us in my group, while other groups from our conference took different routes round the tour. Our next stop, in another part of the complex, was the prototype Amazon Go mini-supermarket. This was a vision of the future of shopping with no checkouts, manned or automated, because sensors and cameras track which goods the customer takes off the shelves, charging them via a phone app to a credit card account if the goods then leave the premises. Its first UK example, by now branded Amazon Fresh, would open to national media attention in the London borough of Ealing in March 2021.

‘You have to download the app before entering the store,’ our colleague turned tour leader instructed. I’ll call her Angela, though that’s not her real name. Rather laboriously we did as we were told. Within seconds, I noticed Angela looking anxiously at her own phone. Then she was buzzing round the group, asking: ‘Which one’s Martin?’

Several fingers pointed at me, doing my best to show interest in the store’s limited range of branded groceries.

‘You are not authorised to be on this tour,’ was her opening gambit, back in corporate lawyer mode, her pale face uncomfortably close to mine.

‘I most certainly am. Look – it says Amazon Tour on my badge.’

‘You have peeled off the label that was concealing the name of Amazon.’

‘I have done what? Are you kidding?’

‘No, I am not kidding. You cannot continue on this tour. You have to leave immediately.’

At which point she rather forcefully unclipped from my breast pocket the additional ‘Visitor’ badge I had been given at reception after the passport scrutiny.

‘Angela, you do know I’m a journalist, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do know that.’

‘…and that I’m the business editor of The Spectator, the oldest newspaper in the English language?’ Pomposity felt like a valid weapon at this juncture. ‘And you do realise I’m certainly going to write an article describing every detail of this episode?’

‘Yes, I do realise that…’

‘I mean, come on. Amazon’s a retailer, for Chrissake. This is a grocery store, not a nuclear weapons facility…’

‘You have to leave immediately. You cannot continue on this tour…’

It was explained later, on Angela’s behalf, that a list of wouldbe tour participants had been submitted to Amazon’s PR department some days beforehand and my name had been crossed out by them. But if any message had come back to our conference organisers to that effect, it had not done so in time for them to alter my badge and reassign me to a different tour. My rejection was either because the company’s bunker-mentality media policy was to exclude all journalists from campus tours or because someone in one of those multiple tower blocks had Googled what I had previously written about Amazon’s tax policies and about the personality of Jeff Bezos, and did not like it.

More sinisterly, I never did discover whether my ejection was triggered by a message from reception saying they had belatedly spotted an unauthorised name among the passport details they had recorded – or whether the very act of downloading the Amazon Go shopping app had triggered an alarm in the corporation’s vast database when it clocked my name. That really would have been science-fiction scary.

Either way, there was clearly little point in standing my ground after a brief eyeball-to-eyeball with Angela in the shop doorway. She was in no sense personally responsible for what was happening – and she no longer works for Amazon, though I hasten to add that’s not because of this incident, so far as I know. There was some talk at the time that if she carried the can internally for such a heinous breach of security, she was at risk of losing her job. But she and I have subsequently re-established friendly relations.

What I missed on the remainder of the tour, I was told, were several more servings of robotic propaganda and a carefully staged encounter with women residents of the Mary’s Place homeless hostel that Amazon had recently funded and accommodated within the campus and was promoting heavily as an example of its corporate social conscience. Members of our group were not permitted to put questions to the women, who were eloquent (tearfully so, one attendee told me) in their gratitude to the company. Homelessness is said to be a particularly acute problem in Seattle because the wealth generated by Amazon, Microsoft and other booming businesses has driven local housing costs sky high.

In a half-hour nutshell, this had been a perfect encapsulation of the good, the bad and the greedy in modern capitalism. A glimpse of a brilliant, disruptive venture that has made every digitally connected consumer’s life easier and given us one-click access to an unimaginable range of goods. But also a business that crushes competitors, reportedly offers minimal staff welfare in its giant warehouses and has accumulated a vast reservoir of personal data about its customers’ habits and preferences, the use or abuse of which is almost impossible to police from outside.

It is a business so powerful that it can effectively choose where and when it pays tax, and how little. It can make cities and national governments jump at the click of its finger. It is capable of treating mildly inquisitive members of the media like me rather as maverick National Security Agency operatives treated Will Smith’s innocent lawyer character Bobby Dean in the 1998 conspiracy thriller Enemy of the State.

And it is a company that is so enormously valued by stock market investors as to make its creator and major shareholder one of the wealthiest human beings of all time – alongside Bill Gates and latterly in competition with the Tesla electric car entrepreneur Elon Musk, followed by the French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, and comparable with gilded historical figures from Cosimo de’ Medici to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Whatever his position in that exclusive league table, Bezos is incontestably rich beyond his own wildest dreams of what he might ever do with the loot, recently resorting to the ultraexpensive folly of sending himself into space in his own rocket. But at least he had also been able, by the time of my visit, to offer a little charity to some of Seattle’s poorest women.

Food for thought, indeed. So is Amazon ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at heart? Or both? Or neither, in the sense that its heart is nothing but a piece of shopping software that must be, in essence, morally neutral. Isn’t it the individuals involved – investors, executives, wily tax lawyers and accountants, complacent legislators, eager shoppers like you and me – whose consciences we should seek to examine?

And what’s greed got to do with it, if the urge to possess or consume more than you need, or more than is obviously good for you, is a basic instinct and economic driving force in almost all of us who have not opted for a life of monastic or survivalist self-denial? In what sense does the accumulation of a great fortune by your own entrepreneurial effort, boosted by the arithmetic of the stock market, equate automatically to the biblical deadly sin of ‘greed’?

I have no difficulty in saying that Jeff Bezos is greatly to be admired for having created such a world-changing business and for remaining focused on its continuing technological development long after he could have eased back into the sybaritic self-indulgences of the ultra-rich. He finally announced that he would shift from chief executive to executive chairman at the end of 2021, but no one really expected him to let go of the controls.

Is he also to be despised for his ruthless capitalist spirit, and for sitting sulkily on his mountain of gold? Or is it OK to express a sneaking admiration for the spirit and the mountain too?

And if the moral of my Amazon anecdote is that capitalism always has rough edges but is capable of changing human experience for the better, shouldn’t writers like me be standing up for it?

‘I can call an Uber and have it take you to join one of the other tour groups,’ was Angela’s conciliatory parting gesture. ‘Maybe Microsoft? Or the medical research lab?’

She had reminded me that Uber – the San Francisco-based, libertarian ride-sharing service that provides low-cost urban journeys at the tap of an app in some 900 metropolitan areas around the world, generating incomes for more than 3 million drivers – is another example of the double-edged sword of disruptive capitalism, having been accused of exploiting those drivers’ willingness to work for ultra-low pay without employee rights, and of driving many local taxi firms out of business.

Likewise, Microsoft in earlier days was accused of ruthlessly seeking unfair domination of its markets when its software was conquering the world and Gates himself was behaving like Andrew Carnegie and his cohort of late-nineteenth-century industrial monopolists, of whom more later. But just look at all the philanthropy in fields of life-saving medical research that Bill and Melinda now fund.

Amazon offers us a particularly vivid parable of all these opening questions. But they apply equally across the universe of large companies, including so many of the great names founded and built up at home in the United Kingdom such as ICI, Marks & Spencer, BP and Barclays, or multinationals such as Unilever and Nestlé.

And they invite comparison with lesser-known but intriguing contemporary examples such as Danone, the French food products group, which in June 2020 made a great show of declaring itself to be a ‘purpose-driven company’ (in French, enterprise à mission), which would henceforth put social and environmental goals ahead of rewards for shareholders. But just nine months later, those shareholders ousted the chief executive responsible, Emmanuel Faber, for the simple reason that he was not generating returns comparable with those of Unilever and Nestlé.

The mechanisms of exploitation of resources, perfection of products, distribution of profit and rewards for leaders of those businesses are perpetually fraught with moral dilemmas. Those dilemmas, far from clear-cut, have been resolved or left unresolved in many different ways. In due course I shall talk about all of them – and I shall conclude that in many cases, companies can be both good and bad at the same time.

But in turning my thoughts back to the British business scene (which will become the primary focus of this book, though I’ll make frequent comparisons with the rest of the world), I was also reminded that – for reasons deeply embedded in our class system and cultural history – we Britons are ever ready to criticise business in general, and to accuse it of ill-motives. We are ready to turn against big business and accuse entrepreneurs of malevolence at the drop of a hat and the turn of the economic tide. We do that far more often, and with more venom, than our American friends ever do.

Over there, profit and wealth are seen as good until they prove themselves criminally bad, in which case it is the job of the US justice system to mete out punishment, starting with the humiliation of the notorious ‘perp walk’ for the chained accused – but even then, the alternatives to capitalism are barely thought of as worth discussing. Over here, business is disparaged in bien pensant circles and portrayed in popular entertainment as habitually wicked. Even when it demonstrates itself to be socially useful and satisfactory to its customers, it continues to be treated with suspicion. Why is that? And who’s right?

Angela was still waiting for my answer, as the rest of our tour group ranged in a tense semi-circle around us awaiting a denouement of the confrontation. I began to compose an impassioned closing speech in my head, but thought better of it.

‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the offer but I think I’ll just walk around the city for a while…’ And so I did, and began to think about writing this book.

INTRODUCTION

PROSPERITY’S ENGINE

HOW CAPITALISM DRIVES PROGRESS

AND RESPONDS TO SHOCKS

Ihave continued thinking about the good, bad and greedy characteristics of capitalism over the three tumultuous years since that visit to Seattle – a period in which (amid many other dramas) the way business behaves now, and how it stands accused of having behaved in the past, has been under scrutiny more than ever before.

There have been, arguably, three particular strands to that scrutiny. In the chronological order in which they came to prominence, they can be simply encapsulated.

In 2019, the question most frequently and aggressively asked was: ‘What is your company doing to rectify the harm it has done to the planet – and why isn’t it doing more of it, and faster?’

In 2020, out of the blue, the question suddenly became: ‘How is your company contributing to the battle against Covid-19?’

And in 2021, as the beginning of the end of the pandemic created new space for fashionable concerns, capitalism encountered the culture war that was changing politics and disrupting educational institutions on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘Are your company or its founders and owners tainted by connections to colonial exploitation?’

That trio of challenges will rank high among the measures I’ll apply in this anecdotal analysis – which will draw much more on personal observation of business over almost fifty years, and on themes I have written about in The Spectator and elsewhere as a journalist, than on the kind of research you might find in a business-school textbook.

And in case you’re wondering which way I’m heading, I should warn readers hoping for a head-on assault on the wickedness of the boardroom world that they will find me, on balance, a critical friend of the capitalist monster.

I happen to believe that most human beings are fundamentally good, or striving to be so, rather than fundamentally evil. I believe also that a company is a device for harnessing collective human effort, rather than an entity with a brain, will or conscience of its own. And with those two beliefs as my starting point, I think I have discerned over these three years of observing, reading and talking about business a trend towards the better rather than the worse – following a couple of decades in which the trend really was in the wrong direction.

Greed, the third element of my title, is of course always capable of leading human nature astray, and I shall not hold back in my condemnation of that ancient sin – though I shall try to distinguish sheer greed for money and luxury from a more admirable drive to achieve capitalist success, which is of course often measured in money.

But in relation to the major 21st-century corporate misdeeds of climate damage and of failure to comply with expected governance norms, and in response to the pandemic, I believe very many companies have latterly reformed themselves in a positive direction; some have indeed behaved very well. And in relation to past history? Well, that can’t be changed even if it can be reviewed through changing filters of modern opinion. But what I will say upfront, without equivocation, is this: capitalism is the greatest engine of human progress ever invented.

That’s a strong statement, but one that would have been largely unchallenged in the western world for at least 120 years, from the zenith of late-nineteenth-century industrialisation on both sides of the Atlantic to the advent of the digital age at the end of the twentieth century. Yes, there have been moments of popular doubt and abiding pockets of ideological opposition. But in broad terms, the advance of the corporation, the manufacturer, the commercial bank and the mass-market retailer is recognised to have served the developed and developing worlds astonishingly well.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, however, capitalism has acquired lecture halls (and online communities) full of critics who say it is failing to fulfil its promise. It is still the global locomotive of prosperity, but in ways which enrich some people and some nations far more than others, and which sometimes seem to cause a great deal of collateral damage. Capitalism – by which, to be clear, I chiefly mean the arena of shareholder-owned corporations and the financial mechanisms that support them, rather than the activity of individual entrepreneurs and small businesses – stands accused of losing its moral compass, of over-rewarding owners and senior executives while exploiting workers and suppliers, and of recklessly damaging the planet in pursuit of profit.

Where did these accusations come from, and when did they begin? It so happens that the changing tide of perceptions I’m alluding to here has coincided largely with my own working life, which began in the City of London in the mid-1970s – a time which was, in this context, perhaps the twentieth century’s last major ‘moment of doubt’: certainly so in Britain, where the economy was moribund, a socialist Labour government was in power, militant trade unions were rampant and strikes widespread, and state intervention was the conventional response to industrial failure.

But by the mid-1980s, when I had grown up to be a globetrotting young investment banker, capitalism was riding as high as ever. After the inflation and recession of the beginning of that decade, the unfettered American economy was booming again under Ronald Reagan. With that boom came widespread faith in the ‘trickle down’ of prosperity from the rich to the rest of society and the stimulative merits of low taxes, illuminated by the celebrated ‘Laffer curve’ which I’ll revisit in Chapter 6.

The UK economy, meanwhile, was likewise being transformed by Margaret Thatcher’s embrace of free market principles, smaller government and lower taxes. In particular, her privatisation programme, selling off industries and utilities that had performed woefully under state ownership, was winning the admiration of the whole non-communist world. I was myself an embodiment of the export potential of that concept, having been posted for a year in Kuala Lumpur to work on the privatisation of the Malaysian state airline in 1985. Frequently asked by everyone from taxi drivers to senior government officials to explain what Thatcherism meant and why it was so successful, I discovered at first hand just how eager the emerging Asian Tiger economies were to learn from what was happening in my home country.

Meanwhile, the world’s most serious competitor to capitalism, the Soviet model of state ownership and central planning, was in irretrievable geriatric collapse – gradually revealing itself, despite decades of state propaganda to the contrary, as an utter economic failure. Inefficient, corrupt, backward in most technologies – yet still investing heavily in missiles that would never in the end be fired at the West – the ruthless regime seated behind the walls of the Kremlin fortress had failed to convert Russia’s ample natural resources into higher living standards for its oppressed people.

In China, by contrast, the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had embarked on radical economic reforms that would eventually create a more potent competitor to free-wheeling western democratic capitalism – but what that turned out to be was rampant capitalism in a different form, essentially state-directed under continuing autocratic Communist Party rule.

The eyes of the world were not yet looking towards Beijing and Shanghai, however. They were more focused on Tokyo, where I worked for two years after my stint in Malaysia and where powerful groups of inter-related shareholder-owned companies (zaibatsu with deep cultural roots and names such as Mitsubishi and Sumitomo) were driving relentless export success, feeding western consumer and industrial demand while Japanese citizens themselves still accepted the relatively austere lifestyle of post-war recovery.

If there was a single product that summed up Japanese technological prowess in that era, it was the Sony Walkman cassette player, a personal stereo with headphones that revolutionised the way young people listened to music, more than twenty years ahead of the Apple iPod. Meanwhile, the Tokyo stock market soared ever upwards on a cloud of western analysts’ hyperbole about the power of Japanese companies to stay ahead in every aspect of manufacturing and technology. And everyone learned this factoid: Tokyo real estate values were so inflated that the Emperor’s Palace and its grounds were theoretically worth more than the whole of California.

And when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the spirit of the decade was finally encapsulated in news footage of Germans from the grey communist east staring in wonder at the vast range of household appliances, designer clothing and other consumer luxuries in the shop windows of the west.

Some scholars said the argument about how to organise the economic world was over: capitalism, quite simply, had won. Yet in the 1990s, that certainty was shaken and undermined – in some ways that were evident at the time, in others that have become apparent only with hindsight.

A VIEW FROM THE CITY

As for me, I left the financial world at the beginning of 1992 to become a journalist. And the subjects I was asked to write about in those first years in my new métier – editors who noticed me tending to assume that after fifteen years in banking, I had an insider’s grasp of all forms of misbehaviour and folly in the business world – constituted a portfolio of evidence for the argument that something had gone wrong, or was about to go wrong, with capitalism itself.

It turned out, for example, that hundreds of thousands of Britons had been ‘mis-sold’ (by respectable life insurance companies such as Prudential) personal pension plans, supposedly a landmark advance in the financial independence that was at the heart of the Thatcherite ideal of ‘people’s capitalism’. I was also asked to write about several large-scale fraud cases – notably the ‘Guinness scandal’, a complex saga of share price manipulation during a takeover bid by the Irish brewery business for the Distillers Company in 1986 – that were the hangover of the 1980s boom in the City of London, where behavioural standards seemed to have slipped as the prospects of multi-million-pound personal rewards rose.

And those prospects were becoming a matter of public controversy well beyond the City. In particular, as public dissatisfaction with the performance of privatised companies rose, so did resentment of the huge pay rises awarded to their bosses to ‘bring them into line’ with private-sector peers. Cedric Brown, an otherwise forgettable senior executive of British Gas, became a cause célèbre in this respect – and my own cover article in The Spectator in May 1993 entitled ‘Snouts in the Trough’ was probably the first full-length analysis in the London press of the issue of ‘fairness’ in top people’s pay, including the difference in entitlements between entrepreneur company-builders and salaried functionaries, and comparabilities between private- and public-sector office holders. Nearly thirty years later, those same arguments still go round and round while blatant excesses are still approved by boardroom remuneration committees on a variety of tenuous and tendentious pretexts.

But greed was not, apparently, confined to privileged insiders: another topic for the keyboard of my first clunky Apple computer was the demutualisation