he was not a particularly high flier, and had realised that UBS was the only firm in the City still coughing up inordinate sums for his ilk. Which made it very ironic that I would need to leave P & D to earn my fortune.
The head of equities at P & D was Hector Sants, who despite being no older than most of his staff, was a somewhat remote figure. It was usually his signature on the memos about Belgian equities.
One should not despise mediocrity, as the purveyance thereof undoubtedly fills a market niche; a lot of fund managers don’t like razor-sharp stockbrokers because they feel intimidated by them. It is comforting to be brighter than your broker, which is perhaps why people with first class degrees almost never make good salesmen.
Also, if you understand too much about what you are saying, you spot the contradictions and find it difficult to continue. Sadly I can’t use a first as an explanation for my failure as a salesman.
My boss Jonathan didn’t either.
I regarded him as a thick, ignorant, abrasive, card-carrying nasty bastard. He didn’t have a degree, but he did have see-the-wood-for the-trees intelligence, a capacity to explain things very clearly, to see the big picture. He was one of the most successful salesmen P & D had and had thus been promoted to manager. He couldn’t manage much, but he did manage to spot the one thing that I had hoped would go unremarked. He said he thought I was ‘crap’.
There was one black person on the entire UBS trading floor. Of course, occasionally a black person would come and fix your computer, and you’d see plenty of Somali cleaners if you were working late at night, but Sharon was different. She worked on the economics team and fancied transferring to sales.
I bumped into her on the Northern Line going home one evening where she explained that she’d asked Jonathan whether she could join our team, and he’d said ‘No’.
‘He was very honest about it,’ she said without rancour. ‘He said he knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself, he didn’t want a woman on his team. I respect him for being so upfront about it.’
I’d heard a different explanation from Jonathan. To me he’d said, ‘Sharon, she’s quite good, but I could never have her on my team. She’s black.’
I think it unlikely that P & D would have fired me, but it was clear that I was unlikely to get richer there, either through an increase in my salary, or a rise into management, where I could begin to assist in the setting of my bonus. I rang up and accepted the Merrill Lynch interview offer.
When I went to see my future boss, Alick, at Merrill’s, it was clear that he had more or less made up his mind to offer me a job. He’d had this brilliantly original idea that stock sold by British and American clients could be bought by the Japanese, and vice versa, thus improving his distributive power. The only doubt in his mind was whether I would accept their offer. I was, after all, fluent in Japanese with five years’ broking experience, so presumably I could pick and choose.
The first interview therefore went swimmingly and I was called in for another to meet the ‘rest of the team’. This meeting took place over a few pints in a pub with Alick and his two colleagues Henry and Charlie, the latter of whom eschewed pints in favour of rather effete bottles of tasteless Mexican lager with lime sticking out of the top. I said I liked the idea of working in a team of four as opposed to the fifty or so at P & D, but made sure that they understood that Japanese money earmarked for overseas was still mainly tied up in Tokyo, so they shouldn’t expect too much of me in London. They assured me that they understood, and took a long-term view.
So far in the interview process I had been protected from senior management. After the pub I was taken in to meet Michael Hewitt. Mike Hewitt! I was at school with him. He was a year below me and a prize prat as far as I could recall. He had been an unusual teenage rebel. Back in 1977-ish, he wore the broadest bell-bottoms with which he could get away without expulsion, but unlike most teenage rebels his hair, jacket, indeed the bell-bottoms themselves were immaculate. He used to glide, ineffably smooth on highly polished illegal cowboy boots, with ridiculously impractical, forward sloping heels.
Thirteen years later the hair was still like the Virgin’s Conception, but bell-bottoms had given way to another form of rebellion, this time against City pinstripe. I am all for rebellions against the City dress code, which seems bent on making everyone look like Alan Sugar, but I found Mike’s olive-green suit from Milan with brown Guccis a bit disconcerting.
It was not entirely clear what his role was – he was in management – but he filled me in on Merrill Lynch and its ethos. He went on and on, seamlessly, and I soon lost track. They had something called matrix management. Mike was as smooth as he had been at school and had clearly mastered matrix management, or at least talking about it, which is the key in these things. He could even manage the plural of matrix correctly.
The three pints I had had were beginning to percolate through my system and I wished he would hurry up.
Mike clearly had me confused with an older, brainier brother who used to win the Pratt Latin unseen prize and the Smedley-Turgess Greek poetry prize every year by being the only person in the school to go in for them. As he went up for his tenth academic prize one Speech Day somebody could be heard from a few rows back saying, ‘My God, is that Pongo Parton’s son – he must have married somebody clever.’ Sadly I had inherited my father’s brains not my mother’s. A similar thing must have happened in the Hewitt family, because he recommended to Alick that I should be hired.
I had also inherited my father’s bladder – my entire family suffer from a high metabolic rate combined with low capacity, necessitating visits to the loo at short intervals.
Final hurdle. I met the Americans. Along with other US firms like Salomon Brothers or Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch has the reputation of being lean, mean, keen, thrusting, determined, ruthless, tenacious, assertive, sharp, not to say aggressive, so I was on my guard, but this interview was also a pushover. I had a pleasant chat with a nice grandfatherly man who was in charge of sales, and a nice, short, rotund, grandmotherly lady from the Bronx who was in charge of research. She was clearly clueless – who am I to criticise? – but had a misshapen sort of charm. I noticed a rather intriguing little gold anklet under her stocking dating presumably from svelter, sexier days.
After all these meetings I just had time for a further brief meeting with Alick who was thinking in terms of £45,000 a year. My bladder was killing me by this stage, so I just said ‘I’ll think about it, goodbye,’ and then dashed back to P & D.
In the evening I was phoned at home.
‘£55,000,’ said Alick tentatively.
We settled on sixty. I promised I would try to persuade P & D to reduce the three-month notice period I was on.
As I handed in my letter of resignation the next day, the head of overseas equities said ‘Jim, I think you’ve made absolutely the right decision,’ which was definitely not in the script. When a high-flier resigns, he is supposed to be kept ‘out of the market’ so that the firm he is leaving can nick his clients. I’d been thinking of three months of paid leisure on a yacht in the Mediterranean. ‘I expect you’ll want to start as soon as possible so we’ll reduce your notice period to a month. You can leave immediately.’
I visited Merrill Lynch towards lunchtime.
‘How did it go?’ asked Alick. ‘Did you have trouble persuading them to let you leave?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But they gave up when they realised how determined I was.’
Chapter 2
For my month’s notice period, I booked a flight to Egypt with Gen, my three-year-old son. This is pronounced with a hard ‘g’ as in Ghengis, not ‘Jen’. People always ask what it means, and it’s nothing to do with the great Khan. It means ‘origin’ or ‘fountainhead’, which may sound silly, but it was chosen by both sets of grandparents, largely because it is easy to pronounce.
My wife Rika couldn’t come because of the pressure