Abstract
If you start with “in the good old days”, it’s a sign you are heading for extinction, but in the good old days, broadsheet newspapers had a City diary column they took seriously. By which I mean they put serious resources into the important business of mucking about. As newspaper circulations tumbled, diaries became a luxury. They got downgraded. Or binned.
It’s a delight that the London Evening Standard has just reinstalled its City Spy column, a group effort to be edited by our rising star Simon Hunt. His early efforts are strong and the response indicates the appetite for this stuff remains huge.
What’s the point of a City diary? To make fun of people who can’t stand to be made fun of. To mock CEOs who, in every other aspect of their lives, get treated like the gods they are not.
It keeps them in order, reminds them that in ways that really matter, they are just as fumbling as the rest of us. The diary might also be a home for snippets we couldn’t justify running as news. Because they are possibly untrue. Mischief, in a word.
When I started at The Daily Telegraph in the late 90s, the City diarist was Simon Goodley.
Neither of us could stand corporate life or quite believe we had stumbled into this world that allowed us to be pretty much ourselves. There was a glitch in the matrix that offered a home to people who read books, but not the right ones, and who regarded anything to do with ordinary working life as boring or laughable.
My path into journalism had started when a kindly teacher took me to one side. I cared only about English, music and sport and found it impossible to pay attention to anything else. These days, they’d say I had an illness and suggest medication. “You need a better plan than this, or your life is going to disappoint you,” she said. “What are you good at?” Reading and writing. “Yes,” she said. “You are also a pain in the arse. Have you thought about journalism?”
Back then, the City editor of The Daily Telegraph was Neil Collins, who took the diary critically. Which is to say, maliciously. Having written something mean, he would hear his sidekick Christopher Fildes pass judgment: “You are far too nice to these people.” Wondering why we hadn’t gone for a particular shaky story, Collins would suggest that it was often better to seek forgiveness than permission. At times, editors were heard to complain that the diary column wasn’t generating enough legal complaints. It is impossible to imagine that now.
As for Goodley and me, well, here were two duffers from Nottingham called Simon who were really into cricket and frequently confused. I got credit for his best jokes and he got blamed for late-night shenanigans in which he had zero involvement.
One of his best gags was about Gordon Brown’s refusal to turn up for Mansion House speeches wearing white tie, as was customary. He was sent tails so he might show up properly dressed. Brown gave them away to a charity shop – Oxfam in Notting Hill.
We bought them back and re-delivered them to the chancellor, whose famously self-effacing sense of humour kicked right in.
Some colleagues preferred to keep the CEOs they imagined to be their pals out of diary columns in hope of future betterment. To us, what could possibly be better than having them in the diary? I once left a message for John Redwood MP, accusing him of involvement in a shady scheme. I had nothing to go on and he should have ignored me. Instead, he left a lengthy reply denying my allegations and several other things I hadn’t mentioned. We were happy to set the record straight on his behalf.
Famous people can play the diary game well. While I was in New York for The Daily Telegraph, I did a fortnightly Wall Street diary. I went to some fashion show in search of material and wrote an item that imagined Donald Trump on the catwalk. “And here comes Donald Trump, with hair by Bobby Charlton and a stomach from the Homer Simpson collection,” it ran.
An editor called the next day. We had messed up. Trump was very good friends with the then-Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black. “You’re going to get a call. Say sorry. A lot.”
The phone rang. “This is Donald Trump.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
“Oh, I don’t care. But tell me, who is this Bobby Charlton guy, does his hair same as me?”
I have found it impossible not to enjoy him ever since.
One of our favourite stunts in those days was to delve into the amateur sports records of failing City folk. When Northern Rock went bust, we became obsessed with the batting average of the CEO Adam Applegarth, who played for some Sunderland second XI.
He couldn’t bat or bank.
When the Schroders fund manager Andy Brough was having a bad run, we discovered he was also captain of the worst football team in all of London. He couldn’t pick a share or a goalkeeper and we ran a series of stories that confused his stock performance with his football results. When his credit card was lost, we mused that he was unlikely to be defrauded, since no one would admit to being Andy Brough. Even Neil Collins queried this. Why do you hate this man? We don’t, we said. Never met him. He’s crap at football, though.
