They spoke with gravitas

On the Today programme this morning both George Soros and Martin Sorrell were airing their views (in the same interview!) on the current economic situation. They spoke with gravitas, as if they commanded the lofty heights of the business establishment. To hear them speak you wouldn’t suspect they were two of the biggest chancers you are ever likely to come across.

Both of them in their time justified Ted Heath’s anathema: “The unpleasant, unacceptable face of capitalism”.

George Soros is an international speculator whose global machinations damaged Sterling in the early 1990s and almost destabilised the British economy - he would later claim that he did nothing illegal, and while this may be true, it was certainly immoral for his actions to put at risk the economic well-being of millions (if they could have got their hands on him the government of the day would have been justified in shooting him).



Martin Sorrell is a more complex character. His career has been very intriguing. Beneath his respectable veneer he seems to be a buccaneering risk taker in the vein of Jim Slater and James Goldsmith.

In the early 1980s Martin Sorrell acquired Wire & Plastic Products, a company that made wire shopping baskets. Renaming it as WPP he used it to buy a number of communications companies (including PR company Hill & Knowlton) in a series of hostile take-overs. His acquisition of advertising agency J Walter Thompson in 1987 was particularly outrageous, being mostly funded by the sale of JWT’s office building in central Tokyo (ie they used JWT’s own money in a take-over against the wishes of the JWT Board).

WPP now employs 100,000 people in a global communications enterprise across over a hundred countries.



Above: J Walter Thompson’s London office has now moved to Knightsbridge, but for me the agency is irretrievably associated with this corner of Berkeley Square in Mayfair. For a long time I aspired (without success, receiving more rejections than I did from Cambridge colleges) to join the denizens in what I imagined to be the lyrical corporate equivalent of Monty Python’s Whicker Island. Now I realise that the image an advertising agency projects of itself (the medium is the message!) is often in inverse ratio to the actual experience of working there.

More on the fantasy image projected by JWT: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad/article.php?year=1971&title=274&article=d.274.41

More on Whicker Island (one of my father’s favourite sketches): http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/whicker.htm

PS rereading this post it seems a little harsh. I didn’t mean to be so damning. It’s just the way it came out.