The Storytellers (18 page)

C
HAPTER

I
T WAS THE FIRST week in December. Over the preceding five months, Andrew had persuaded each of his top managers to leave. The financial saving had been substantial; the long-term damage no less. These were good men whom he had picked and with their departure, the teams he had spent the last ten years building were in tatters. To an outside eye, his companies still functioned and at a low enough level to keep the bank off their back. Products were serviced, orders, such as they were, processed and the salesmen still chased down every lead until it went nowhere. But it was as if their overseas customers had migrated to another planet and their domestic ones become zombies. Like the Champion Group itself, they appeared alive but were dead.

As for himself, he was exhausted. For two years he had been fighting the steepest downturn in living memory and what made it worse, the severity of the downturn was his own government's doing. Inflation
was
coming down and union monopolies
were
being smashed, but as strategies went, this one seemed no more intelligent than solving an urban overcrowding problem by lining up half the population and having it shot. Still, he knew it was a conceit to
imagine that the men and women his companies employed wouldn't be able to survive without him. They would. It was time to call a halt.

The appointment of a liquidator was distressingly straightforward, like summoning the undertakers when Great-Aunt Molly has finally passed. Andrew then visited each of his companies to tell his people the game was up. Fighting back tears, he was barely able to look them in the eye. Some had been with him from the start. A few days later came the creditors meeting. Like the reading of a will, guaranteed to disappoint one and all, those owed money were asked to register their claim in the certain knowledge it would not be fully met. Liquidators must sell things for what they can get, not for what they might be worth tomorrow. The biggest loser, as it turned out, would be The Royal Bank whose half-hearted paperwork left it exposed as an unsecured creditor. Feeling full of shame, Andrew sat alongside the liquidator and marvelled at the politeness of those small traders owed money. Doubtless each one worried that he could be next.

When the company car was driven away from his home, a feeling of utter failure engulfed him. It was over, all over. He smiled at the thought of Freddie Stern looking down at him from wherever Freddie had ended up, not cruelly but wistfully, as if to say, ‘Well, it wasn't so easy chum, was it?'

Sitting alone in his front room, he was aware of his heart thumping like a jackhammer. Christ, was this it? Thump, thump, thump! – deafening, like a rain of shells except that the explosions were coming from within, like pistons. He might have sat that way for five minutes, or twenty or even for an hour: he had no sense of time. Then suddenly his head cleared. This was not his moment to die. He still had a wife and children to think of. They would have to sell the house and find somewhere smaller, and he would have to find some other way to make a living. OK. So the world was full of mantraps. Well next time, he'd try not to be so dumb as to get caught up in one.

* * *

To check on the economic pulse of the nation as 1982 got under way, Harvey started his fact-finding odyssey in Aberdeen. What he encountered lifted his spirits considerably. The place was humming with energy and activity, much as he imagined the South Wales valleys had been in the 1750s. The town had almost seamlessly turned from supporting the North Sea fishing industry to doing the same for its new industry built upon the discovery of oil.

Still on the east coast, but an hour or so further south, he found Dundee in a less ebullient mood. In the early part of the previous century there had been as many as sixty-two jute mills and at its height, two hundred ships were built at its docks in a single year. Things were not nearly as bad as they became following the collapse of the jute industry at the start of the twentieth century, but several of the light-engineering companies, lured in from America to soak up the town's then chronic unemployment, had been laying off workers, and people were anxious.

From Dundee he crossed over towards the west coast and stopped in Cumbernauld, a town built from scratch in 1956 as an overspill from Glasgow. There he learned that the Burroughs Corporation, one of America's eight major computer companies, had cut its workforce from 3,000 to 1,600 and planned to cut it by half again.

In complaining that the ideology of the Prime Minister prevented her from intervening when an international company ‘was destroying Scottish jobs', the Labour Member of Parliament for West Stirlingshire, Dennis Canavan, deployed a kind of self-serving logic that Harvey frequently encountered. Having been created by the company in the first place, the jobs were hardly the Prime Minister's to give.

If criticism was levelled at where he thought it should be – at the political class as a whole for failing to create an environment in which new jobs were created at the same time as old jobs died – the
MP for West Stirlingshire would find himself as much in the firing line as the Prime Minister. Bearing witness to the Herculean struggle taking place between left and right of the political divide, Harvey increasingly found himself wishing for a plague on both their houses.

From its halcyon days as the Empire's second city, Glasgow itself had fallen far. Britain's decline after the First World War and the Great Depression which followed it brought immense hardship to the city's people, augmented in number by immigrants from its earlier, glory days. In self-defence, many of them had turned to radical socialism. Rearmament in the Second World War brought some respite, but there was no peace dividend. Attempts to revive the city in the 1950s had stalled and a surly mood prevailed, now made worse by high unemployment generally and high youth unemployment in particular.

Wishing to report on manufacturing, he had decided to avoid the coal mines on this trip, and drove straight from Glasgow to Newcastle. Like many of Britain's great conurbations, the city on the Tyne had flowered during the Industrial Revolution, feeding off – and feeding – Britain's imperial reach. Shipbuilding and heavy industry lay behind its now faded prosperity. The adjustment to decline had been no easier for it than for Glasgow. Rising public-sector employment empowered politicians and provided much-needed work, but on the trading estates he visited, the high death rate amongst private companies, many low-margin subcontractors to larger concerns, themselves struggling, was plain to see. Newcastle had also experienced its share of riots when young men without work had lashed out against each other and any buildings that came to hand.

Harvey's trajectory was like the sign of Zorro reflected in a mirror: from right to left, to right and back to left again. If Glasgow was the British Empire's second city outside the capital, Liverpool was its second city, period. The wealth of this metropolis, briefly and depending on how measured, even exceeded that of London itself. The foundation of that wealth was slaves. From its start in the early
1700s to the trade's abolition in 1807, some 1.5 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic in Liverpool vessels. On their outward journey to collect this human cargo, the ships were not empty but carried textiles and other manufactured goods from Manchester and elsewhere in England's industrial heartland.

As a foretaste of what awaited a city that once saw 40% of the world's trade pass through its docks, Liverpool was the Titanic's port of registry. The great Belfast-built ship went down with 1,517 of its passengers and crew on 15th April 1912. Another telling detail was that many of those drowned were seeking a new life in America, just as their forebears had sought out a better life in Liverpool.

Harvey had never visited Merseyside before, but even more than the metal-masters and merchants of Glasgow, where Protestant and Catholic had achieved an uneasy truce, Liverpool held a special fascination for him. The popular music of his generation was forged within the city's crucible. The sorry soulfulness that had flowed across the Atlantic from Africa in Liverpool's ships was picked up, reworked and thrown back by Bill Haley, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, to mutate again through the prisms of LSD and preludin, into the complex, lyrical beauty of Strawberry Fields Forever. The music's high priest was unquestionably that tormentor of perceived wisdom, John Lennon, whose simple song ‘Imagine' so offended America's religious right.

But all that had been in the 1960s. In early 1982 the people of the city could only immortalize the Cavern Club, where their homegrown heroes had cut their teeth, and mourn the loss of their greatest son who had been shot outside his apartment in New York just over a year before. Containerization had finished off their docks in the 1970s and now they had to contend with a brutal recession which was pushing unemployment in the city towards 17%. Riots in Liverpool's inner city district of Toxteth had equalled those in London's Brixton, even prompting the Prime Minister to visit the area in her black Jaguar.
She was pelted with tomatoes and toilet rolls and never returned.

As this visceral hatred permeated Liverpool's politics, Harvey found that moderation's demise was creating space for the Trotskyist faction Militant, and its figurehead, Derek Hatton, to establish themselves. In time, by taking on unfunded debt while living high on the hog, this man and his movement would wreak as much damage on the city as their nemesis. It seemed to the journalist that extremes bred extremes: that when consensus failed, raw energy searched for new concepts, new ideas, around which to coalesce. The battle for power between ideas was emotional. Its rationality came later when one idea prevailed and a fresh consensus formed.

The misfortune, it seemed to him, lay in what America's war planners euphemistically called the collateral damage of the process. He had read that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw life as a tragic struggle between chaos and order, where order was the imposition of a great will that would always be overtaken by events. If Britain came though the hardship he was witnessing, would the consensus then be Thatcherite? He supposed so. But as Nietzsche also suggested, consensus without curiosity for truth would engender a shallow land.

From Liverpool he drove south to Birmingham before his return to London. In November, British Leyland's now 58,000 strong workforce (down from 250,000 at its peak) had gone on strike over pay. The company seemed to symbolize everything that had gone wrong with British industry since the Second World War. When Clement Atlee's great reforming government took the coal industry into public ownership and created the National Health Service, succeeding socialist administrations seemed uncertain whether industry was a business to be run for profit or a branch of the social services to be kept on a tight leash by the UK Treasury.

Thirteen years after Morris and Austin merged in 1952 to form the British Motor Corporation, BMC purchased Pressed Steel. This
company made the bodies for Britain's remaining car manufacturers. From thirty-four British-owned registered car-makers in 1950, most had been absorbed into British Leyland, a colossus created after BMC, now called British Motor Holdings, was merged with Leyland Motors in 1968 to create the second largest motor manufacturing company outside North America. The creator of this monstrous enterprise (taken into full public ownership in 1975) was the socialist, Tony Benn, a man more interested in the exercise of workforce democracy, under his indulgent authority, than in either business or engineering efficiency.

The upshot was an enterprise, shot through with inter-brand rivalries, whose management was shared by shop-floor unions, a government minister, the UK Treasury and professional administrators (one could hardly call them managers) who reported to the government like civil service officials. It seemed to Harvey that a structure less likely to succeed would have been hard to conceive. To use the German philosopher's parlance, this was disorder onto which a powerful vision needed to be imposed.

Short of running the show herself, Harvey could understand why Margaret Thatcher had not stopped Michael Edwards, the South African chief executive appointed by her desperate predecessors to thrust a stake through the heart of the Frankenstein monster they had created, from chopping up the cobbled-together body and selling off its parts to whoever would buy them. But it was a poor advertisement for his nation's collective intelligence. Collateral damage was everywhere. The road to hell
was
paved with good intentions.

In a state of despondency, he thought he would look in on Andrew Champion before heading home. Surely his favourite entrepreneur would have some good news to report not linked to North Sea oil?

* * *

“Excuse me. I'm looking for the Champion Group?”

Harvey's question was met with a blank stare from the woman coming out of the next door office.

“I think they've moved,” she said. “There's been no one for several weeks now.”