Shhh . . . Even Guardian readers have started to make money
Published 27 March 2000
Media - Ian Hargreaves
When the Sunday Times list of Britain's richest people was first published in 1989, it was the unmistakable progeny of its powerful, unlovable parent.
Andrew Neil, the paper's editor, was at the height of his confident analysis of British society in the light of the American, meritocratic values he had soaked up in the Carter-Reagan transition of the early 1980s, when he was the Economist's New York correspondent.
It was the decade of the yuppy. On Budget day 1989, Margaret Thatcher's "brilliant chancellor", Nigel Lawson, was still in Downing Street, with no indication that, by the end of the year, he would be gone and a British economy growing by more than 4 per cent a year would be plunging towards the minus 2 per cent zone.
But the Rich List survived. Its 12th edition appeared on 19 March, listing Britain's most prosperous thousand citizens, from Hans Rausing, the 74-year-old Swedish economic refugee whose family designed the boxes that contain our morning milk, to Keith Young, the director of a company that registers Internet domain names.
These days, the Rich List has competition - from the Mail on Sunday's Rich Report, which reports on "Britain's top 300 millionaires", and the Observer's guide to "The Young Rich", a selection of over a hundred people aged 30 or under, mostly dot-com entrepreneurs, entertainers or aristocrats.
In newspaper terms, the Mail and Observer efforts (timed to appear a week before the Rich List) are spoilers, though I should think about as effective as a particularly hard walnut in jeopardising the progress of a steamroller.
None of these supplements attracts much advertising - three pages out of 66 in the Mail's version, and nothing but routine car and wine ads in the Observer. Only the Sunday Times's recklessly costly 86-page magazine carries ads befitting the product, offering swimming pools, yachts and private jets. This is called power dressing.
It is clear that the newspapers' attitude to money is not what it was. The Guardian, the traditional home of the public sector professional, used to devote much less space to business than other broadsheets. And what coverage it did have was as likely to involve Larry Elliott predicting the demise of global capitalism as anything that might be mistaken for information for the stock-market investor.
The transforming agent is the Internet. Now the Guardian, the owner of the best general newspaper-based website in Britain, devotes a whole page each day solely to e-finance, and has increased its business pagination generally. Although it is still weak on market analysis and services to investors (as opposed to savers), the paper has plans for a website devoted purely to personal finance.
Perhaps most tellingly, editorial attitudes within the paper have also started not so much to shift as to heave. In a recent edition, the business section's "Notebook" turned to the issue of executive (once aka fat-cat) pay - prompted by the news that Sir John Browne's remuneration at BP had doubled to £4 million a year.
The writer soberly noted: "One aspect of globalisation has been the quiet realisation that, if we want British companies to compete, they need top quality staff - and top employees cost top dollar." For a paper such as the Guardian, whose editorial offices still look like they belong to an overgrown student publishing operation, and whose editor, Alan Rusbridger, worries out loud about the problem of staff resistance to dot-com remuneration deals, this is momentous change.
Catherine Bennett, one of the Guardian's grumpier columnists, captured the dilemma nicely in a piece reflecting upon the life and times of Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of the recently floated Lastminute.com.
Bennett boldly announced that she was pining for the yuppies, those "vulgar, greedy asses" who, by having no taste and doing jobs that no normal person would want in commodities and bonds, "made not being rich less irksome".
Then, along comes Lane Fox and her dot-com pals, "fairly enterprising, moderately industrious, a bit left-leaning, university-educated . . . with no obvious faults beyond having been born confident, intelligent and middle-class". In other words, sshhhhh . . . Guardian readers.
After this, the conclusion of Bennett's piece that "habitual English nosiness about other people's money" was dissolving into "an ecstasy of money worship" somehow lacked conviction. The question is whether it will take more than economic collapse and the ruin of a brilliant chancellor to get the furniture back in order, or whether under Tony Blair the British will finally learn to love the stock market, an activity that still involves fewer than one in five of us.
Meanwhile, the radiant Lane Fox offers a spot of political philosophy in the Observer: "In my naive bourgeois ideology," she confesses, "everyone would share everybody's money and we'd all have the same amount."
Tell that to the naive, bourgeois journalist mentioned in this week's Media Guardian. He has quit his job, re- mortgaged his house and set out to make a million as a stock market day-trader. He even has a book contract in his pocket to record the experience.
And yes, a company with no assets called Alchemy has indeed bought the British car industry. And no, the John Hargreaves who appears at number 11 (£1.35 billion) in the Sunday Times list is not my brother. He sells clothes. My brother is a schoolteacher. In Batley.
Ian Hargreaves is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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