Tim Jackson - Virgin King (Text Only)

While many businesses suffer from a ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome – a resistance to ideas that come from other organizations – Branson has no shame in picking up suggestions wherever he finds them. All day long, he carries around with him a black A4 notebook – standard issue, bought from the Rymans stationery chain – into which he jots not merely ideas that might be put to use in his businesses, but also names and telephone numbers, notes on conversations, and lists of tasks to carry out. Richard Branson’s daily to-do list usually contains thirty items or so; the idea is that by numbering them, he can attend to the most important first and thus make best use of his time. Such is the respect he is held in by his employees that many senior staff in the different Virgin companies now carry the same notebooks with them, and can be seen scribbling down thoughts and notes of conversations in exactly the same way. Like the rest of Branson’s life, the notebook is resolutely low-tech. He neither types nor uses a computer, and he acquired a mobile phone for the first time only in late 1993.

As well as a second house in Holland Park, two doors down from the one that he uses as his office, Branson owns a villa in Minorca, a country house in Oxfordshire surrounded by fields and a large pond, and a private island in the Caribbean. There is a swimming-pool in the basement at Holland Park. The Oxfordshire house, his weekend retreat, has its own cricket pitch; Branson flew in a pair of Balinese craftsmen to build a cricket pavilion in the style of a traditional temple, complete with carved wooden doors and a roof of thatched rice straw. Necker Island, part of the British Virgin Islands, now belongs to the company rather than to Branson personally; it boasts a house large enough for twenty or more, a chef brought over from the Michelin-starred Manoir aux Quat’Saisons restaurant (in which Branson happens to own a controlling stake), and an extensive cellar that includes vintage clarets and burgundies as well as lighter whites suitable for quaffing on the beach.

Yet Branson seems oddly detached from the outward details of his life. It does not bother him that paint is flaking off the back of his house in Holland Park, or that the swimming-pool filter no longer works. He owns a Range Rover because he was given it by the buyer of the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II, the speedboat that broke the Atlantic speed record; but he is perfectly willing to allow his two children, both of primary-school age, to drive it around his fields in the country. He has always eschewed the ostentatiously high living of the music industry, particularly the chairman of one record company who makes a point of parking a spanking new Rolls-Royce or Bentley outside the front door of his offices. Since he married his second wife, Joan Templeman, Branson has supplemented his trademark collection of sweaters with more expensive casual jackets and shirts. Yet he often succeeds nevertheless in looking as though he picked the clothes he is wearing out of the cupboard at random in the dark – and he specializes in wearing brown shoes that look as though they were on special offer at Woolworths.

Nor does he have expensive gastronomic tastes. While many of his top managers have become connoisseurs of food and wine, Branson is the first to admit that he is unable to appreciate the finer points of the Quat’Saisons cuisine on his private island. He used to make it a rule never to spend more than £15 on a bottle, and was scandalized when colleagues wanted to spend company money tasting good vintages in restaurants.

Most rich men of Richard Branson’s age start to collect things as a way of finding a use for the millions they have amassed. The pond in the grounds of his Oxfordshire house duly contains a number of rare species of duck and goose from around the world, their wings carefully clipped to prevent them from flying away. Branson takes pleasure in strolling around the pond pointing out the bright colours on the plumage of each one – but cannot quite remember which is which. He is fond of telling the story of how, when he used to live on a houseboat oh the Regent’s Canal, he and Joan once returned from a weekend away to find that the boat had flooded and sunk. Yet Branson had no regrets to discover that all his worldly goods had been lost – for he knew that his photograph album, which was more precious to him than anything that mere money could buy, was safely stored somewhere else. Proof of how little his attitude has changed can be seen in his decision to put the two houses in Holland Park on the market at the turn of 1994 with a price-tag of £15m, and to start looking for another houseboat so that his family could move back to the canal from which he started twenty years ago.

Indeed, most of Richard Branson’s pleasures could be enjoyed just as easily without great riches. He loves tennis and swimming in the sea; underlying his boating and ballooning in the second half of the 1980s were great reserves of physical courage, which allowed him several times to face death without panic. He plays practical jokes that are more physical than intellectual – throwing people into swimming-pools, dressing up in bra and suspenders at parties for Virgin employees, pushing cakes into people’s faces in the style of television cartoons. At an airline-industry awards ceremony, he once grabbed hold of Ivana Trump, the former wife of a leading American property billionaire, and turned her upside down in front of hundreds of astonished black-tie guests. It is this humour above all that makes Richard Branson such an object of affection among his employees. The ear-to-ear smile that he wears for so many hours every day conveys a simple message: business is fun.

Underneath this gregariousness is an insecurity. Richard Branson’s lack of verbal fluency was intimately linked to his poor academic record at school, and his decision to leave rather than to go to university. For a man who has made his money in industries that are all about communication and people, Branson is sometimes astonishingly inarticulate. He will talk with passion when his interest is raised, but can be stumped by an utterly straightforward question. During one of the last interviews he gave for this book, Branson took a fifteen-minute break in order to record for a camera crew waiting in his sitting-room a short speech of welcome to a charity dinner that he could not attend. The speech was warm and friendly, conveying all the right points about the charity’s work, and ending with a rousing demand to guests that he would never see to give generously to the appeal at the end of the evening. But its three minutes were punctuated with umms and aahs – hundreds of them, separating not just sentences and phrases but also single words. Despite the decade of practice he has had, and the hundreds of television interviews he has given, Branson remains clearly ill at ease with the spoken word. When he got up at the end of a chat-show interview in 1992 and poured a glass of water over the head of his host, the audience took his action as a joke, and laughed uproariously. They were probably wrong. Emptying the glass of water was more a sign of Richard Branson’s frustration at being outmanoeuvred by the glib questions he had been asked.

If there is one respect in which Branson can fairly claim to have been valued by the public at less than his real worth, it is to do with his charitable activities. He is not a giver of huge sums to charity in the way that some businessmen are; nor does he have to his credit, as the Sainsbury family do, a gift to the cultural life of the nation on the scale of a new wing for the National Gallery. But Branson has been involved in three important projects in which he has attempted to give something back to the community from which he has made his riches. The first was the UK 2000 campaign, a scheme to bring together a number of different government and private initiatives to improve Britain’s environment and to provide useful work experience for the young unemployed. From the very day Branson took on the chairmanship of the campaign, he was dogged with the tabloid misconception that it was nothing more than a litter-picking organisation; his departure from the job a year later, after acres of hostile press coverage, was a relief to himself as well as to his advisers at Virgin.