The Storytellers (8 page)

C
HAPTER

A
NDREW CHAMPION felt relieved. At last the company he had started eight years earlier was gaining some traction. It looked as though all those sleepless nights, long hours and nail-biting risk-taking were about to pay off. His wife certainly hoped so. He was not an engineer by training but the engineering industry was where he had ended up. A chance call from an accountant had brought him into contact with a small sheet-metal-working company in Henley which needed a £6,000 loan – ‘Just to tide us over,' the company's new owners had said.

Andrew had become that fabled creature, an entrepreneur. The label at least assured others even if its coverage was wide. After business school and a short spell as a banker he'd started his own venture-capital business from a windowless basement office in London's Mayfair. Although the air became stale and headache-inducing if ingested for too long, the address was good.

Looking back, he still found it hard to understand why he had been attracted to the Henley venture. When its retiring founder sold his creation to two local men, the business was already on life support. Its workforce and machines were over-ripe for retirement themselves
and with only one steady customer, its weakness was clear. On paper, there had been little to recommend it, other than its obvious need – the same thing that attracts people to a runt in the dog pound.

Shortly after making the loan, secured against every conceivable part of the business, Andrew took up residence, partly to escape asphyxiation and partly to escape the Mayfair rent which even for a subterranean room had been eating into his savings. The directors had been surprised at first, but doubtless thought it best to humour the person who had saved their commercial bacon.

Due diligence, the process of trying to work out what one was about to get involved in before there was no turning back, was rarely perfect. One hoped that after the event, one would unearth a previously hidden asset and he had discovered one of sorts. When a locked cupboard at the back of the ex-owner's office was opened, shelf upon shelf of boxes, labelled
USAF Supplies
, were revealed. It seemed that the company had done work at a United States airbase and been paid in kind – fifty cartons of rubber condoms. But as no one had known how to move such sensitive merchandise, the products had languished and to Andrew's disappointment, were no longer serviceable. After closing a deal, the fear was that one would be confronted by an unexpected liability. And what appeared on this side of the balance sheet was altogether more alarming.

The directors informed him, in hushed tones, that the buyer at their only serious customer was in receipt of a regular envelope. Keep up the tradition or lose the business, was their candid advice. But Andrew was buggered if he was going to get involved in such whoopee. Besides, short of handing over the envelope himself, he had no means of knowing where the money inside actually went. For several weeks he fully expected sales to slump, but they never did. In fact, they increased. However, this only laid bare the factory's woeful shortcomings: quality and productivity were abysmal.

A smart man would have walked away, but the smell of machine
oil and the physical making of things were getting to him. Even the bloody hand he incurred operating a fly-press – a weighted screw you swung to drive a metal punch through a sheet of steel into a matching metal die to generate a particular shape of hole – failed to deter him. There was romance in engineering. However mundane your product, you were creating. So instead of retreat, he advanced, converting his loan into a controlling interest in the company as its terms allowed. The previous owners needed little persuading to move on and were lucky to escape with their skin.

Thinking about it now, the adage that fools rush in where wise men fear to tread surely applied. But as he considered the journey he had taken, he wondered how much would ever be achieved without such folly. Or at least how much would ever be attempted if the obstacles ahead were known in advance. Faced with a moribund factory – workshop would have been a more apt description – located in a part of the country where the skills he needed no longer existed, he decided on a radical step. He would relocate the business to an area where light engineering was still practised, and fill it with machines that were not decrepit.

It was while researching what machines to buy that he met Freddie Stern. Another free spirit on the lookout for opportunity, Freddie had gained control over a company that made a range of machines to replace the fly-press, under licence from a company based in Canada. But the Rolls Royce he drove belied the tenuous hold he had over this creature. A flirtation had ensued between them with Freddie looking for finance and Andrew looking for a way to increase the sophistication of his product range.

Eventually he had acquired this company simply because he understood the financial system better and was able to offer Freddie's edgy backers stronger credit. Not long afterwards, the Rolls Royce crashed with Freddie at the wheel, killing him. The harsh purity of the capitalist system was not lost on Andrew. He knew that any misstep
on his part and it would spit him out just as quickly.

Not long after relocating to their new factory, they were battered by the three-day week (an embargo on industrial activity introduced by the Heath government to conserve energy, in its battle with the National Union of Mineworkers, whose coal supplied much of the country's power). For over two months, in mid-winter, he and his men had spent two days a week in a factory without electricity. All they could do was move things around by hand, so that when production proper was allowed, it was as efficient as possible. That had been in 1974, a year in which Britain's engineers haemorrhaged cash.

The industry's ills went back to the Second World War, or even, some thought, to the First. Once dominant in the world, the sector had lost its way. Japan and Germany, whose manufacturing capacity had all but been destroyed by 1945, were making better-engineered products in almost all sectors and the Americans continued to dominate in their home market, although this was beginning to change. He had read of many reasons for this decline. Winning the First World War had drained Britain of financial and human resources. After that, the emphasis had been on living well, not on driving productive efficiency. Workers and managers had gone through hell together and owners, by and large, did not have the stomach to face up to their country's declining position in the world.

The Second World War put America in the driving seat and although Britain's manufacturing industry was intact, it was worn out. Had it been destroyed, government, owners and workers would have had no option but to rebuild and refocus from top to bottom. Instead, a sprawling mass of disjointed inefficiencies was laid out like a threadbare carpet over a genteel but impoverished land.

Not long after his encounter with Freddie Stern, Andrew had visited a once-proud company near Southampton which was adrift. The frustrated managing director had been on the lookout for anyone willing to invest. Andrew remembered thinking that the place smelt
of death: a hospital with corridors of tired linoleum whose patients could check in but not out save via the mortuary – an industrial Hotel California. However, in amongst the rancid pessimism, he had found treasure: an optimist working away on the design of a new machine his company would never build.

Harold Loxley was one of those life-enhancing people one comes across all too rarely and he and Andrew hit it off. Andrew knew that the machine designs he had purchased from Freddie were out of date, even though far in advance of a fly-press, which could only punch out one type of hole at a time, manually. The latest Canadian-designed machines could hold a number of different punches and dies in their thick circular discs, and the sheet of steel could be moved between them by an operator guiding a stylus around a template in the way those old double-writing machines forced a second pen across the paper to match the pen being used. But the Japanese, Germans and Americans were moving to machines operated by a computer rather than an operator following a template and to survive, he knew he had to follow suit.

Harold needed little persuasion to abandon his sinking ship, and Andrew made him managing director of the machine tool business. Within a year, he had come up with a revolutionary new computer-controlled punching machine that could be sold cheaper than its competitors. In spite of teething troubles, a result of its rapid development, the product was a success. At last the groaning debts Andrew had built up accumulating the bits he had now fashioned into a working whole could start being repaid. But it was then that fate chose to reveal the dark side of her nature.

It was one of those clear, cold mornings in which pockets of mist dot the landscape like floating cobwebs. Harold was hurrying to a customer. He always drove fast, especially on motorways. Inside the bank of fog he entered at full speed was an invisible row of stationary vehicles, brought to a halt by an accident further ahead. Harold's car
hit the tail end of a lorry and he was killed instantly, his life insurance policy still unsigned within a breast pocket. He left behind a lovely young wife, two dear children and a gaping hole in the lives of all who knew him. Andrew did his best for them, which even now he felt had not been much, and turned to steadying his shell-shocked company.

Within a year, a new managing director was hired along with a cocky ex-army engineer who set about designing a new model. Andrew's empire now consisted of three parts: the original revitalized subcontract engineering business in its new factory, the machine tool business and a new unit tasked with utilizing the rapidly-evolving micro-computing technology to help with production scheduling – the task of optimizing the flow of work through a factory.

So long as sales were increasing, the machine tool business was a cash generator. A deposit was taken with each order and machine components were purchased from outside, leaving only the assembly, design, maintenance and marketing in-house. So while suppliers could be paid after two months, most of every machine ordered had been paid for prior to delivery. This positive dynamic was dented slightly by the fact that some of the components in the punching machine were made by their own sub-contract unit, but at least that was cash neutral.

The micro-systems business was decidedly cash negative as it consisted of a small team writing production-programming software suitable for use in a micro-computer. Andrew knew he would have to attract outside investors to augment his company's meagre £100 in share capital and mountain of debt courtesy of the bank. A subcontract engineering business would attract no interest and although a machine tool business might attract some, it would be the micro-computer products outsiders would want to back.

In spite of the bedlam in the country generally, with over 1.5 million unemployed and much of private industry ignoring the government's restrictive pay policy, 1978 had been a reasonable
year for the Champion Group, the name Andrew had given his commercial activities, and 1979 looked as if it would be better still. He'd even been interviewed by a journalist from
The Sentinel
doing a piece on what the nation can achieve without the unions. They had all been a bit chuffed by that. He knew his company's balance sheet was severely stretched, with a preponderance of creditors, but cash was finally beginning to flow in rather than out.

The nation's predicament was simple enough. Unlike the private sector, which had been forced to come to terms with inflation and marry what it produced to what it could sell, government-controlled industries were being run to maximize employment and the government simply couldn't meet its escalating wages bill. Neither taxes nor prices could be raised and public sector employees could not be reduced quickly enough without triggering waves of strikes. From autos, to coal, to steel, industries taken into public ownership by past socialist governments were becoming progressively uneconomic. Although few on the left cared to admit it, capitalism was proving smarter than Karl Marx. Even the centre ground was shifting. Under a barrage of bad publicity about public sector strikes, the 5% lead Prime Minister Callaghan had enjoyed in the polls before Christmas was gone.

Andrew wasn't much interested in politics. He had backed Edward Heath against the miners. He'd even gathered all his workers together at the time and told them that if Heath lost, which, in the end, Heath had, the country would go to hell in a hand cart. Now the Conservative Party had a female leader who seemed to believe that a nation's economy was little different from a household budget. Perhaps such simplicity was all an electorate could understand. In any event, this time he planned to keep his views to himself, although he had spilled his heart out to Harvey Mudd, the journalist from
The Sentinel
. He'd liked that man and people needed to know what it took to build a business.

C
HAPTER

T
HE CAR CARRYING George Gilder and his wife left their five bedroom house overlooking Primrose Hill at 8.20 p.m. As the editor travelled down Albany Street, the sun was setting across Regent's Park. It had long been his paper's tradition to host an election-night party and he expected that tonight's would bear witness to two great events: the rise of Britain's first female prime minister and the start of a radical new direction for his country. But had
The Sentinel
done enough? Were a majority of the British people persuaded of the need for change?

His paper had shown corpses piling up in Liverpool when gravediggers had gone on unofficial strike, rubbish bags stacked high in London's Leicester Square, motorists queuing at petrol stations for scarce supplies and dead piglets dumped in front of union offices in Hull by furious farmers unable to get deliveries of animal feed. The general sense of chaos had been augmented when a group of Protestants bombed several pubs in Glasgow frequented by Catholics; although in Scotland, discontent with a Labour government tended to migrate to the Nationalists rather than ‘they Tory toffs' as Conservatives were disparagingly called north of the border.

Nonetheless, the Scottish National Party had done its bit for the cause by withdrawing support from Callaghan's coalition when it didn't get its way on devolution, bringing down the government and forcing the election that was approaching its conclusion. One thing did still rankle though. In January, when the Prime Minister returned to his cold, unhappy nation from a conference in the sunny Caribbean and said that things didn't look so bad from overseas, it was a rival newspaper that had come up with the headline ‘
Crisis? What Crisis?
', nailing the public's growing frustration with its government.

Turning into Woburn Place, he passed a large billboard with a seemingly endless line of people snaking across it under the words
Labour Isn't Working
. Over a million were unemployed, the highest number since the war. And only three years earlier the government had been forced to secure a loan from the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its finances. As he turned these things over in his mind, he marvelled at the stoic nature of the British people. Surely enough was enough?

The new leader of the Conservative Party had promised to lower taxes, cut government expenditure, curb the power of the unions, bear down on inflation and outlaw the kind of secondary picketing that had done for Hunters. All the opinion polls indicated that her message was finding an increasingly receptive audience. Looking back, years later, he considered it a blessing no one had known how ruthless she would be in pursuing those objectives and how much worse things would get before they were attained.

* * *

When the small group who'd had dinner in
The Sentinel
dining room entered the main office it was approaching 11.00 p.m. The polls had been closed for an hour, but no results had yet been declared. From a large screen, David Dimbleby was welcoming viewers who
had just joined the BBC's election coverage
– Decision 79
. The room was full, with staff and guests making the most of the open bar and buffet set out at one end.

“Now she needs a swing of 4.5% to get a working majority,” the Canadian political analyst, Bob McKenzie, was explaining. “If we aggregate all the opinion polls we get a swing to Mrs Thatcher of 4.7%. But if we look at the constituency polls they are showing a swing to Labour of .7%, enough to put Mr Callaghan back in Number Ten. But remember, both polls have been wrong in the past.”

“Who is that young woman in a wheelchair?” Frances Graham asked her host.

“That's Abigail Hunter. I'll get Harvey Mudd to introduce you. He broke the Hunters' story and has got to know the family quite well.”

There had been only twelve in the dining room, but she and Harvey had been at opposite ends of the table and neither had attempted to build on their unexpected encounter in March.

“The indications are,” the forty-one-year-old broadcaster was explaining, “that there has been a high turnout, in spite of the bad weather, and our first result may come from the smallest constituency, Glasgow Central. Do you expect a fairly even swing across the country, David Butler?”

“Yes, I think there will be a more even swing than many have been expecting,” the Oxford researcher answered, “except in Scotland, where our first result could come from, so it probably won't tell us much.”

“I see Mudd is tied up, so let me introduce you myself.”

George Gilder guided Frances through the crush and cigarette smoke to a petite woman whose chair was parked by a side wall with a clear view of the screen.

“Miss Hunter, I am George Gilder, editor of
The Sentinel
. This is my guest, Lady Graham, who has asked to meet you.”

“Frances, please,” Frances Graham implored as she bent down.

“Yes, that's the trouble with these chairs,” Abigail Hunter acknowledged. “You are always at one level, usually the wrong one.”

“I read
The Sentinel
piece. It must have been horrific.”

“To be honest, all I know about it has come from what I have been told and from reading that journalist's quite brilliant article.”

“Mr Mudd?”

“Yes, Harvey Mudd. He really captured it I'm told.”

“They arrested the man who did this to you, didn't they?”

“They did. Max something or other. He's in prison now, thank God. And, do you know, he wasn't even a member of a union?”

“There was another young man arrested as well, wasn't there?” Frances asked.

“Yes, a Trotskyite organizer from Cowley. He was acquitted unfortunately. The pickets proper were from the Transport and General Workers' Union. They weren't even prosecuted,” Abigail recounted, the first note of bitterness sounding in her voice.

“And what is going on at Flood Street, Michael?” the broadcaster asked, trying to maintain a momentum that could not be allowed to flag until 4.00 a.m.

“Well, I think we are all watching you, David.”

“So no sign of Mrs Thatcher then?”

“No. No sign. We believe she is inside with her family.”

“With all her family?”

“Yes, all her family is here. We expect her to travel to her Finchley constituency later.”

“Will you get out of this?” Frances asked.

“No, they don't think so. But we are hoping to modify a truck so that I can drive again. I would really like that.”

“So your family still has trucks?”

“Not at the moment, I'm afraid. We're starting again. And to think, my grandparents survived the war!”

They both looked across at the big screen where Robin Day, sporting his trademark bow tie and brandishing a large cigar, was talking so unconvincingly about his humble opinion that David Dimbleby could barely keep a straight face.

“I really hope she wins,” Abigail said, as one of her brothers came over with a glass of wine and Frances left in search of her husband.

* * *

“These are the forty-one marginal seats Mrs Thatcher must win if she is going to get a working majority,” Bob McKenzie was explaining standing next to one of his boards. “A rosette will mean a Conservative win, a tick a Labour hold.”

“Now let's go to one of those constituencies, Derby North,” the broadcaster picks up, “to see what the floating voters we have been following finally decided. Bernard, what have you got?”

With two on either side of him, one woman and three men, Bernard Falk asks the question. The lady says she decided on the way to the polling station that a change was needed and she'd voted Conservative. Mr Callaghan, she thought, was too old; Mr Steel, the Liberal leader, too young; and Mrs Thatcher was just right! The man next to her says he voted Labour last time and had again. He wanted continued moderation. On the other side of Bernard Falk, the first man admits that he had voted Conservative because he thought a vote for the Liberals would be wasted and he did not want Labour. The remaining man had also voted Conservative, which, he explains, was a change from last time.

“That's Mrs Thatcher leaving Flood Street, dressed in the most brilliant blue. So thank you, Bernard, and now over to Flood Street.”

The sound of boos and cheers are audible as reporters press towards her.

“Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Thatcher, the returns are moving in your
direction…”

“We are just reserving judgment,” she says in that buttery-crisp accent Britain's voters will come to love or hate.

“Are you cautiously optimistic?” they call out.

With a dazzling smile, she turns briefly and answers, “Yes,” before a car whisks her and Denis Thatcher away to Finchley for the count.

* * *

By 12.45 a.m., it was still not clear. Only seventeen results were in. There appeared to be a small swing to the Conservatives in the north, but a much larger one in the south.

“That's a 9% swing to the Conservatives in Walthamstow,” David Butler calculated. “If the country behaved like the East End of London there would be a Conservative landslide, but if it behaved like Lancashire, we would have a hung parliament.”

“The interesting thing,” David Dimbleby observed, “is that the National Front vote dropped.”

“All the fringe candidates have been doing very badly,” his colleague elaborated.

Frances Graham, together with Mrs Gilder and several other ladies, were sitting together and clearly getting bored, all praying for a clear enough pattern to emerge so that they could justify going home. David Graham, by contrast, was well stuck in. He and three of
The Sentinel
journalists, used to killing time, were playing a game of poker in which money was changing hands and the circle of onlookers around them was growing in number.

“Men just like risk,” observed Andrew Champion looking across. He had been surprised to receive an invitation from the newspaper, but it had come via Harvey and everyone in his company had liked the
Sentinel
piece.

“Either taking it or watching it,” Harvey modified. “I guess I'm
a watcher.”

“Well someone has to tell the tale of us lunatics on the frontline,” the entrepreneur urged.

“And it's not just men who like risk,” elaborated Harvey. “Many an upper-class lady over the centuries has had to turn to her husband to pay off her gambling debts.”

“And to assume paternity of her lover's child,” chuckled George Gilder who had been passing them and picked up the tail end of their conversation.

“It is probably the desire to avoid boredom that drives most of us on in the end,” the entrepreneur confessed as they glanced towards the screen where the broadcaster was attempting to introduce some clarity as the top of the hour approached.

“Well after twenty-two results our computer is saying that Mrs Thatcher will form the next government with three hundred and thirty-seven seats in the new parliament, and that Labour will have two hundred and seventy-one, the Liberals nine and the SNP three, way down from where they were, and the other parties fifteen.”

“The assassin's curse,” muttered the editor, recalling that it was the Scottish National Party which had brought down the Labour coalition. “He who pushes in the blade rarely rides off with the prize!”

Andrew Champion thought about Freddie Stern and wondered.

“So what do you make of the results so far, Perry?” Robin Day asked of his guest, the veteran high-Tory journalist, Peregrine Worsthorne, who considered Margaret Thatcher too bourgeoise to make much difference, and prophesy to be the most unnecessary of all human error. “Do you see a north-south split?”

“These results leave me baffled,” he said. “But we are paid to appear wise before the event. So while I don't know if I'd categorize it as north-south, I do think the problem for Mrs Thatcher will be that while there is a large body of opinion moving right, there is also a substantial element who won't want to be pushed around by the
kind of things she wants to do. So even if Mrs Thatcher wins a clear majority, there will be a substantial minority that does not want to go along with her.”

“A true romantic,” eulogized the editor. “He is one of the few writers who still manage to be anti-capitalist and anti-communist in the same sentence!”

“The Conservatives hold Chingford,” the broadcaster continued. “That's Norman Tebbit's seat, one of Mrs Thatcher's gang of four, who make raids – intellectual raids – on the Labour Party from the Tory backbenches. That's an 8.5% swing to the Conservatives.”

* * *

It wasn't until after 3.00 in the afternoon that speculation gave way to a new reality. Harvey had hung around until 5.00 a.m., but most of the ladies had left shortly after 1.00. He had even joined David Graham's poker game for an hour. Having done no more than exchange nods with Frances, he was curious to find out what her husband was like. But all he learned about the Scot was that he was a better poker player and utterly ruthless when applying the bluff.