Pride and Avarice

by Nicholas Coleridge

  After the Newsnight film, several ‘industry experts’ were brought on for a debate, including a dreary representative from the British Retail Consortium and two city editors from the newspapers. Almost all of them seemed broadly supportive of Ross’s bid even though, as the man from the Financial Times pointed out, it would be a ‘David and Goliath’ fight, with David picking on a giant twice his size. ‘Logic dictates Freeza Mart shouldn’t be able to pull this one off,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know that logic will be the deciding factor.’

  The moment the item ended, the phone rang and it was Miles. ‘That was a disgrace, a travesty,’ he stormed. ‘The first thing I shall be doing is putting in a formal complaint to Ofcom. The BBC have contravened their charter obligation for impartiality. I don’t know who’s working their PR, but they’ve pulled a blinder. That footage of your house, James, it can only have come from Ross’s side, they must have handed it to the TV people. Outrageous. To overfly a private house belonging to someone like yourself … totally irresponsible. Don’t worry, we shall be filing a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother complaining about the house being filmed,’ James began.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I do bother. I notice we weren’t shown Ross’s enormous house, that blot on the landscape at the end of my valley.’ Then, suddenly remembering Dawn had helped commission the place, he backed off and said, ‘Well, the whole programme was a farce but don’t worry, James, we’ve already put a rebuttal team in place. I’ve got sixteen people working round the clock at Straker Communications and we’re drafting more in as we speak. Believe me, they won’t be getting a free ride from here on. The fightback has started. We’ve already begun work with Deutsche Bank on the defence document. We’ve got fourteen days to produce it and it’s going to be very feisty, don’t you worry. I’ve spoken personally to six of the thirteen national newspaper editors and three proprietors so far. And over the next few days we’ll be putting quite a few people right about Ross Clegg. He’s not going to be looking so pleased with himself when it all starts coming out, I can assure you.’

  Amidst all the drama, everyday business still had to go on, as Ross constantly reminded his managers. Distracted as he was by interviews on the Today programme, video conferences with fund managers and institutions, and constant demands for quotes from the newspaper business sections, he still tried to put in five hours a day of ‘proper work,’ as he described it, keeping on top of sales and epos data and meeting with the Freeza Mart logistics team. But he recognised that by far the most important two hours was the 8am ‘morning prayers,’ the daily war cabinet with his advisors and inner circle. Each meeting opened with a briefing from Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, who presented a digest of the morning’s newpapers and radio and television comment. Each item was categorised as friendly, unhelpful or neutral. So far, friendly pieces outweighed hostile ones by five to one, though Archie and his bosses did not expect this to last. ‘Straker Communications are being very proactive,’ they reported. ‘They’re fixing up interviews all over the place. Even family members who never speak to the press are being touted around town, like Michael Pendleton and even Otto. You’re going to see a mass of pro-Pendleton propaganda coming out in the next few weeks.’

  After that, the group was updated on investor sentiment. Freeza Mart’s bankers, accompanied by Ross himself or by Ross’s finance director, Heather Smail, were touring as many institutions as would agree to see them, making their case for the takeover and talking up the efficiencies and enhanced purchasing muscle it would bring. It was part of Freeza Mart’s argument that Pendletons had fallen behind in its IT development and lacked precision in stock control and logistics. ‘They have some of the best retail sites in the country,’ Ross repeated again and again, ‘but they’re not capitalising on the advantage. An integrated business could add four or five percentage points to the operating margin. And the first thing we’ll do is sell and leaseback all the property, the whole damn portfolio, every store, Pendletons’s head office, the lot, releasing hundreds of millions in shareholder value.’

  In one area only, Ross was unwilling to go for the jugular. His PR team—and Archie in particular—urged him to attack the Pendleton family personally. ‘They’re sitting targets,’ Archie argued in a presentation on the subject. For almost an hour, he gave a Power-Point briefing on each of the Pendleton brothers, their respective inherited shareholdings, homes all over the world, art collections, racehorses, and collections of high performance and classic cars. Photographs had been sourced of yachts bobbing in the marinas of Cannes and Sardinia, evidence of their unfitness to run a major supermarket group, and even of their wives and partners. Ross flinched when a photograph of Dawn flashed up onto the screen. ‘That’s enough, Archie,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go down this route. I know James Pendleton personally and he’s a decent bloke, I won’t say anything different. And I don’t want anyone on our team being disrespectful about them either.’

  ‘But, Ross,’ Archie persisted. ‘We’ve got this whole strategy worked out. It’s going to be, like, this northern self-made hero on the one hand, versus all these effete toffs and pooftahs blowing gazillions on modern art. Which would you rather buy your loo paper from?’

  ‘Forget it. No way am I approving that. And, for the record, I don’t actually come from the north country, I’m from the West Midlands. And before you say ‘same thing,’ you might like to take a look at a map and figure out where our great industrial cities are located.’

  ‘Ross, I’m telling you, it’s a great PR angle.’

  ‘No. And that’s my final word. If we can’t make our arguments and win this thing without resorting to personal abuse, I’d rather not win and carry on as we are. Understood?’

  Archie nodded sullenly, but seemed unconvinced.

  At midday, Ross joined his marketing people in the ninth floor meeting room where a photocall and press day had been set up for the media to interact with Freeza Mart’s brand ambassadors. The seven girls including Sam had become famous almost overnight, following the launch of the first multi-platform campaign. Wherever you looked, their faces loomed down at you from billboards. The media buying agency had snapped up half the sites on the approach roads in to Central London, including ten on the Cromwell Road opposite Tesco, to push the new fashion range. Half a dozen West End tube stations, including Oxford Street, were temporarily ‘owned’ by Freeza Mart, with every platform and escalator plastered with their posters. Glasgow and Newcastle undergrounds received the same treatment. All the bus sides in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham were covered with them too. Archie was massively excited by the campaign, telling everyone, ‘the blonde with small tits is my sister,’ though he complained when a sixty-sheet billboard went up in Roupell Street bang opposite their cottage. ‘I can’t even shag my girlfriend without seeing my sister’s big face through the window.’

  Magazines like Glamour and Marie Claire carried eight-page promotions pushing the FM brand and ran contests to win key pieces from the first collection. But it was probably the television commercial which most quickly captured the public’s imagination, with its saucy catchphrase, ‘I’m a Freeza kinda girl … just kiddin’,’ with a knowing backwards glance over the shoulder.

  Whenever Sam walked down the street, teenagers pursued her shouting, ‘just kiddin’.’ It was an enormous relief to escape back to Scotland where the campaign hadn’t penetrated.

  Today, however, she was back in town for the photocall and press day, and as usual it all seemed a bit unreal, sitting on stage with the six other girls, answering random questions from the media.

  ‘Hey, Sam, what’s your favourite piece from the collection?’

  ‘Er, probably the button-front sundress for six pounds … but it’s all nice actually.’

  ‘Sam, are you girls really all best friends, or is it just for show?’

  ‘We get on great together. We al
ways have a good laugh on shoots.’

  She spotted Ross standing at the back surrounded by his PR people including Archie, and Debbie who’d come down from her own floor to watch. Ross smiled at her and gave a thumbs-up. He looked tired but full of energy still, clearly running on adrenalin. It would be several more weeks before the takeover was decided. Few of the big institutions had come out one way or the other so far, and Pendletons were due to issue their defence document in the coming few days.

  After forty minutes of questions, Sam’s attention began to wander. She’d been listening to Peter’s music on her iPod on the flight down, and couldn’t get it out of her head. It was stuck there in a loop. Even now, having heard it for so many months, she found many of the tracks addictive. It should have been a big hit, Sam reckoned.

  Afterwards, standing by the table for coffee and a Danish, and chatting to Ross, Archie and Debbie, she gave Debbie a listen to her iPod.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ Debbie said after a bit. ‘Really, really amazing. And I’m not just saying that because it’s Peter.’ She went very quiet, then said, ‘Dad, I’ve had an idea. Can I drop by and talk to you about it later on?’

  64.

  Miles felt personally affronted. Each time he saw a picture of Ross, which at the moment was several dozen times a week since you couldn’t open a newspaper without confronting his cocky face, he erupted. ‘This impertinent, mendacious, opportunist bid,’ was how he described it over lunches and dinners. His rota of meals with politicians, regulators and opinion formers reached new heights, at which he briefed against the proposed merger, citing consumer choice, abuse of monopoly position, corporate governance issues, spurious diversity issues and anything else he could come up with that might strike a chord. If all else failed, he fell back on ‘character issues,’ implying Ross was unstable (‘His wife, Dawn, recently walked out on him, and I’m afraid an awful lot of bad stuff is going to come out’) and contrasting him with the public-spirited, philanthropic Pendletons. Most of the people he lobbied never entered a Freeza Mart from one year to the next, so he painted a picture of filthy aisles and food past its sell-by date (‘They’ve been fined more than once’) and ‘one of the worst corporate responsibility records in the country.’

  But, most of all, Miles felt afraid for his own business. If Ross prevailed, and Straker Communications lost the Pendletons account, it would leave a gaping hole in his results. Not only was Pendletons his most profitable account, it was also one of the most prestigious and acted as a magnet for other wins too. For more than twenty years the fortunes of Straker Communications had been inextricably intertwined with Pendletons plc. In his vainer, madder moments he saw himself as the fifth Pendleton brother, so closely did he identify with the family. That all this might come to an end thanks to Ross Clegg was something terrible to contemplate, and he would resist it by every means at his disposal.

  It did not help that he kept seeing giant posters of Samantha aiding and abetting the opposition. Between his office in Mayfair and Pendletons’s Barbican headquarters, he passed no fewer than nine super-sized billboards starring his daughter in cheap clothes. One of his new lines of attack, unleashed over his lunches, was that Freeza Mart manufactured its fashion range using sweatshops and child labour. There was no proof of this, but Miles wouldn’t put anything past Ross. He had recently dispatched an investigator and photographer to China and Sri Lanka to sniff about.

  As for Sam, he admitted she looked very fetching on the posters and, under normal circumstances, and a different client, he might have been quite proud of her. But modelling for Ross was an act of treachery. To have a daughter prepared to demean herself in this way was something he found personally abhorrent.

  Meanwhile, the public relations strategy he devised for the Pendletons became subtler and more sophisticated. He realised the qualities he most admired in the Pendletons—their impressive houses and money—were the same qualities most liable to condemn them. And so he organised articles that saluted their artistic philanthropy (The Saturday Telegraph magazine published a piece about six sculptors and carpenters who had benefited from Pendleton bursaries) and sought to suppress anything that hinted at their wealth. At the same time, he organised for journalists to be flown above Chawbury Park and photograph Ross’s huge home from the sky. Newspapers were supplied with pictures of Ross in shooting clothes carrying a sleeved shotgun and cartridge bag, to imply he was a greater toff than any Pendleton. The photographs duly appeared and doubtless did some damage, but Miles understood that investor sentiment was continuing to shift towards Ross. If he was to avert catastrophe, he must raise his game.

  Peter and Sam stood in the cheese and dairy aisle of Freeza Mart in Scrabster, allowing the music to waft over them. It was unbelievably exciting. Sam looked round at the other customers, seeking a reaction, but they continued loading up their trolleys, seemingly oblivious to The Cormorants Cry broadcast over the in-store tannoy. Peter’s voice sounded wonderfully mellow as the lyrics reverberated around the superstore.

  ‘Well, Debbie wasn’t exaggerating then,’ Peter said. ‘They really are playing it.’

  ‘And, just think, it’s playing in all the other Freeza Marts too, at this exact moment. According to Debbie, four million people will have heard it by Sunday night.’

  Peter laughed. ‘All that time I was writing songs, I imagined them being played on the radio, not in a supermarket. But you know something, I like it. It feels good.’

  They had driven along the coast road from the cottage to the recently-opened Freeza Mart, the largest superstore in Scrabster, a cavernous shed right by the ferry port overlooking the North Sea. Seagulls wheeled and shrieked on the quay outside. ‘Ten o’clock is when they ought to begin playing it,’ Debbie had said. ‘Depends how good local compliance is, but a head office directive has gone out to all stores. They’re supposed to play it five times a day, the whole album, for a week. Call me if it doesn’t happen. In fact, call me anyway. I’d love to know.’

  ‘It’s just so kind of Debbie,’ Peter said, as he’d been saying every day since she’d come up with the idea. ‘I really owe her one.’

  ‘I told you, she loves the music. I mean, really loves it. I couldn’t get my iPod back, I had to pull it off her head.’

  ‘And nice of Ross, too.’

  ‘Oh, he likes it as well. Debs played it to him in his office, when she was selling him the idea. He thinks it’s great. If this works, they might do it with other new records, it’s like a test.’

  Peter’s voice, singing ‘The Secret Trapped Inside,’ echoed around household products.

  At checkout, paying for their groceries, Sam said to the cashier, ‘This music’s really great. What is it, do you know?’

  ‘You’re the third person this morning to ask,’ she replied. ‘He’s a new one on me—Pete Straker, that’s the name. It’s on promotion in the music and DVD section, if you’re interested.’

  ‘You should sell them next to the till,’ Sam said.

  Miles set up three lunches in a row and was looking forward to none of them. It was an indication of how pessimistic he’d become recently that he had to resort to such desperate measures. The Pendleton brothers seemed sanguine, but the people who surrounded them—their managers and loved ones—were starting to panic and to point the finger of blame at Straker Communications for failing to get their message across. The defence document, upon which so much hope was pinned, had been tepidly received, despite its trenchant language. ‘Reject Freeza Mart’s Offer,’ urged the Board, speaking of this ‘unsolicited and unwelcome offer which substantially undervalues your company.’ It went on to praise Pendletons’s ‘strong management team with a clear and focused strategy, exceptional growth prospects, outstanding track record and financial performance and global leadership in attractive markets. The Board therefore has no hesitation in advising shareholders to reject the offer.’ Miles had hoped the defence document would stop Ross dead in his tracks, but the momentum behind him was
alarming. Only this morning, Dawn called Miles at his office agitated at having watched Ross on GMTV’s breakfast business news ‘spouting complete rubbish about how well he’s doing, and all the ditzy interviewer did was nod her big head agreeing with him.’ Worse, two of Ross’s most high profile supporters, Brin Watkins and Callum Dunlop, both came out strongly for him on a Bloomberg investor forum, saying they’d built up positions in Pendletons which they planned to vote behind the takeover.

  At his regular backs-to-the-wall banquette table at Mark’s Club, Miles bought lunch for Dick Gunn and was already regretting sitting alongside rather than opposite him, since the space was uncomfortably tight. In the intervening years since he’d last encountered Dick, during the Italian holiday when he’d kidnapped Samantha on his yacht Gunnslinger II, Dick had become even richer and more obese. The City pages were full of his exploits, adopting aggressive investment positions in a national garden centre chain, house-builder and roadside recovery service, before disposing of them again at high premiums. Miles had scarcely forgiven him for the seduction of his daughter, but needs must. Today, having ordered a dozen blue-shelled gulls eggs as a pre-starter, and made appropriately admiring remarks about the Gunn Partnership, Miles raised the prospect of Dick buying Pendletons stock. ‘If you acquired, say, 4 or 5 percent of the company, and announced you’d be voting with the family to stay independent because you believe greater shareholder value will be created that way, that would be a highly satisfactory development.’

  ‘I’m sure it would. For the Pendleton family. What’s in it for me?’

  ‘Ah,’ replied Miles. ‘Obviously I’ll need to discuss that with James and the brothers. This is merely an exploratory chat, to gauge whether there’s any interest on your side. But I don’t think it would be exceeding my authority to promise a seat on the Pendletons board. And I think our friends in Whitehall might see their way to some … public recognition, given your remarkable contribution to the fitness of British industry over the past two decades.’