Tim Jackson - Virgin King (Text Only)

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1994

Copyright © Tim Jackson 1994, 1995

Tim Jackson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006382676

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008240646

Version: 2017-01-05

DEDICATION

For Emily Marbach

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE: Concealing the Art

1 1969: Easy Work, Good Money

2 One Per Cent of Tubular Bells

3 Broken Bottles

4 Media Mogul

5 Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?

6 Dear Randolph

7 To Market, To Market

8 ‘Too Liberal a Use of the Lawyers’

9 The Little Boys and Their Boats

10 Hales and the Lionheart

11 Enlightened Capitalism

12 ‘I’ve Got to Believe You’re Serious about It’

13 Hot Air

14 Flying Across Two Oceans

15 Recovery in Woodstock Street

16 A Man of Property

17 Branson Succumbs to Takeover Fever

18 Loos, Booze and Upper Class

19 The Price of Privacy

20 Playing at Retailing

21 How John Thornton Earned His $3m

22 The BA Bonus

23 Heathrow Airport and the Slot Machine

24 A Matter of Timing

25 The £40m Wager

EPILOGUE

KEEP READING

CHRONOLOGY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE: CONCEALING THE ART

RICHARD BRANSON is Britain’s best-known entrepreneur, but it is not for his business activities that he is famous. Branson first achieved celebrity with his 1985 attempt on the Transatlantic sea speed record. Since then, he has ballooned across the Atlantic and the Pacific; spent an unhappy year at the helm of a Conservative government campaign to clean up the environment; launched a new brand of condoms in the hope of encouraging young people to have safer sex; and made a bid to run Britain’s National Lottery, which was unsuccessful despite his promise to give away all his profits to charity.

Even when it is his business interests that bring him into the public eye, it is more often Branson the public-relations man than Branson the entrepreneur that is on display. If his picture is in the newspapers, it might be in order to announce a new plan to redevelop the old GLC County Hall on the south side of Westminster Bridge, and to drum up interest in the hotel and leisure complex that Branson hopes to build there; or to persuade the Radio Authority that Virgin 1215, Branson’s medium-wave pop-music radio station, should be allowed to change to a more profitable frequency on FM. Or it could be to announce Virgin’s participation in a consortium running trains between London and Paris through the new Channel Tunnel; or to win a £5m legal case against Lord King’s British Airways. In every case, the coverage has a sound commercial reason behind it.

Only rarely does Richard Branson find his business activities under scrutiny against his will – and almost never does the public see this most public of entrepreneurs doing what he spends most of his time doing. But there should be no mistake: like most people who run companies of comparable size, Branson devotes most of his waking hours to his businesses – hiring staff, negotiating deals with other companies, conferring with lawyers and accountants, telephoning scores of his managers all over the world, answering letters from behind his desk. Few questions are asked about this side of his life; fewer still are answered.

This may be paradoxical, but it is not accidental. There are two Richard Bransons, one behind the other. The public man is informal, friendly, idealistic, happy-go-lucky, attached to his family, guided by strong principles, concerned to improve the society he lives in. The private man is a ruthlessly ambitious workaholic; a hard bargainer, an accountant with an instinctive feel for minimizing the losses on each new venture; a gambler who prefers to put his assets at risk every day rather than retire to a life of luxury on what he has already made. He is an empire-builder who keeps the inner workings of his businesses secret, and requires senior employees to sign binding confidentiality agreements before they come to work for him; a figure of great wealth and political influence who would not dream of breaking the law, but is equally determined not to pay a penny more in tax than he has to; an important customer for a number of top legal and accountancy firms, who knows the value of highly paid advice; and a business partner who may be informal and positive when he is being fairly treated, but will go to the High Court for a writ without a moment’s hesitation when he believes he is not.

Most public figures would be hard put to maintain such a distance between their outer and inner selves. Yet there is nothing fraudulent about the way Richard Branson behaves. The key to understanding him is that his warm public persona is not a façade. It is every bit as real as the commercial steel underneath. But Branson has realized, instinctively if not consciously, that his business interests dictate which Richard Branson he should put first, and which the public should believe in. His motto ought to be ars est celare artem – art lies in concealing the art.

In many ways, Richard Branson is a model of what the socially responsible company chairman ought to be. A visit to his office provides the first clues. It is not an office at all, in fact, but a large white stucco house in Holland Park, a few miles to the west of Marble Arch in central London. The house could hardly be described as modest – it is worth at least £5m – but less than a dozen people work inside, an astonishingly small number for the centre of a group of companies whose value is approaching £Ibn. Branson himself keeps a desk in a sparsely decorated room on the first floor, but prefers to conduct his business from an apricot-coloured sofa in the sitting room that occupies the left half of the entire ground floor. To the right of the entrance hall, there is a large dining room for business lunches and dinners, with twenty or more chairs around its table. Branson’s diary and his correspondence are dealt with by a personal assistant and two other secretaries; his press chief works in another room, with an assistant of his own. All the different Virgin Group businesses have their own headquarters, mostly in modest buildings scattered within a mile or two of the house. The nearest thing that the company has to a headquarters, apart from Holland Park, is in a three-storey building of brown brick around the corner in Campden Hill Road. That is where Trevor Abbott, the group’s chief executive, keeps tabs on the money; that is the registered office of many of the hundred or so companies that make up Branson’s empire.