6 days ago
After 15 years of scoops and scandals, it's time to say goodbye
In some ways, 2010 feels like yesterday. In others it seems like a foreign country.
In September that year, I arrived at this paper from City AM as commercial property correspondent. Thanks to the kindness of an early contact, I got a decent story in my first week — the seizure of Goldman Sachs' old headquarters complex on Fleet Street by a group of German lenders, which had run out of patience with its indebted offshore owner.
That set the tone for the next few years. Writing about real estate meant writing about the busting of leveraged investors who had gorged themselves in the boom years.
Sometimes that busting was spectacular: I was among guests waiting for the party to start aboard tycoon Vincent Tchenguiz's yacht in the south of France in 2011 when he was unavoidably detained in London by the Serious Fraud Office (Vincent and his brother, Robbie, took on the SFO in an epic legal battle and eventually won).
Few people then understood that, just two years after the financial crisis, we were already in the foothills of one of the greatest bull runs ever, fuelled by near-zero interest rates and money-printing by central banks. Cheap equity rather than debt reflated the property market, turning homes in Chelsea and Knightsbridge into Monopoly assets. One of those who grasped the scale of the opportunity, the late housebuilding impresario Tony Pidgley, remarked that he emerged from that bonanza with plenty of 'wool on my back'.
It culminated in the Spac madness of Covid. Valuations of scalable tech giants exploded. Industries exposed to structural changes in consumers' behaviour — for which, read smartphones and price-conscious shopping — imploded.
Becoming retail correspondent in 2013 gave me a front-row seat for corporate dramas such as Tesco's defeat by Aldi and Lidl under Phil Clarke and Marks & Spencer's descent into infighting under Marc Bolland. But it also meant being an undertaker as household names fell into administration or turned to company voluntary arrangements to close stores. That role led me to the scandal of Sir Philip Green and BHS. The Topshop tycoon sold the tatty department store chain for a token £1, apparently in an effort to get rid of its £571 million pension deficit. It went insolvent little more than a year later. Our reporting contributed to forcing Green into repaying £363 million to the BHS pension funds and sending Dominic Chappell, his chancer-buyer, to jail for tax evasion.
The BHS saga remains my favourite investigation — and for those who wonder, as far as I can tell Green remains much the same. When we last spoke a couple of years ago, I asked what he was doing after the demise of his Arcadia empire. 'Avoiding wankers like you,' was the response.
My favourite scoop was our Saturday-morning revelation that Unilever had tabled a secret £50 billion bid for GlaxoSmithKline's consumer health division. There is nothing like the mixture of elation and relief you feel on opening an email titled 'Response to press reporting' and learning that the M&A story you were 95 per cent sure about is accurate.
Tales like these don't come around often. Nor, these days, do colourful interviews. Obtuse and lip-loose is a fruitful but increasingly rare combination. Two of my favourites were The Range founder Chris Dawson — Devon's answer to Del Boy — and outgoing Babcock chairman Mike Turner, who told me he was on his second wife and looking for his third. It is notable that, asked to name the charity they supported, both said the Inland Revenue.
Much of the cultural change that has swept the business world over the past few decades has been positive — few would pine for the 1960s industrial days Turner described at aircraft manufacturer Hawker Siddeley, where 'they didn't have toilet doors, so the foreman could march up and down and see you reading The Sun'. But some fun and irreverence has been lost in the institutionalisation of boardrooms. So has some of the risk appetite.
These reminiscences are preamble to the announcement that this is my final Agenda column for The Sunday Times. After 15 rollercoaster years, I am leaving to launch a consultancy, Newcome Advisory, which will provide senior media advice to boards and investors, and connect interesting people.
It has been a privilege to work at a paper with a business section that pursues big stories. I have been surrounded by talented colleagues — from Ben Marlow, who broke the news of Pfizer's bid for AstraZeneca, to John Collingridge, who dug into the Sanjeev Gupta end of the Greensill scandal and Jill Treanor, who continues to grill bank bosses weekly.
I should salute lesser-sung newsroom heroes such as Steve Furlong, a trusty Sherman tank of a chief sub-editor. I would like to thank the many contacts who have fed in tips, often for no other reason than a desire to help.
Most of all, though, I would like to thank you, the readers. I have appreciated your feedback, even when it's been blunt. I apologise for the occasional mistake and I hope you have enjoyed the commentary.
I know you will be in capable hands under Jon Yeomans, the business editor. I will miss writing this column, which provides the best pulpit in business journalism. But I also look forward to being one of you.
