Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  A typical page of a Richard Cullen credit-card statement reads like this:

  Alliance and Leicester

  Interest charged: £71.07

  Late fee: £25

  Overlimit fee: £25

  There are thousands and thousands of pounds’ worth of these £25s. Then there are letters, too, like this from Barclaycard:

  According to our records your Barclaycard history has been excellent and we have consequently enrolled you in our Guaranteed Acceptance Masterloan Programme. This means we have set aside £7,000 for your immediate access without an application or any questions whatsoever.

  And then, later, another letter from Barclays:

  Dear Mr. Cullen,

  We regret that we have been unable to pay the following, as there were insufficient funds in your account:

  Payment in favor of Frizzell for £554.09

  Payment in favor of Barclaycard for £339.06

  Your account has been debited £30 which is the fee charged when we are unable to make payments due to insufficient funds.

  This letter did not come from a human being. A computer, with the printed signature J Smith, churned it out. There are a number of identical ones—signed by J Smith—dating back to 2002. How can Barclays say Richard Cullen didn’t seem to be in trouble, when payments were being declined from one corner of Barclays to another? At one point, Richard Cullen went 17p over his Lloyds limit. He was charged £20 for this, and then the interest on that £20.17, and so on.

  And then, finally, in the last weeks of his life, scores of letters like this:

  Your failure to pay your arrears of £166.04, despite our reminders and offers of assistance, has forced us to withdraw your credit line and take steps to inform the credit reference agency.

  The statements tell the story of a man who thought he could beat the credit-card companies at their own game but discovered that he couldn’t. He’d been telling the truth about his absence of secret vices. In the last year of his life, almost every payment on every page of every statement was to a different credit-card company. The odd exception was nothing: a £13 subscription to a gardening magazine, and so on.

  But he had lied about one thing. Richard Cullen, at the time of his death, didn’t owe £30,000. He owed £130,000.

  • • •

  I CALL KEITH TONDEUR of Credit Action, which monitors our spiraling debt problem. I tell him what Wendy had said about how hard it used to be for people like them to get loans.

  “That’s right,” he says. “Thirty years ago you’d go to your local bank manager. He’d say, ‘A thousand pounds? You must be joking. I’ll give you three hundred.’ We go into banks looking for the best advice, but I know one chief executive who describes his branches as ‘shops.’ We treat our bank managers like we treat our doctors. They say, ‘Ah, you’ll need to buy some insurance with that, sir.’ And we believe them. But in fact we’re just being sold things. And this is an industry that’s self-regulating. Why is that?”

  • • •

  LATER I HEAR the story of why it takes three days for an electronic transfer to clear. Transfers used to really take three days to clear, in the days they were delivered by carrier pigeon, or whatever. But now, in this computer age, they take an instant to clear, but they keep the three-day rule going so they can accrue three days of interest. The banks make tens of millions from these wheezes.

  • • •

  IN OCTOBER 2003 Matthew Barrett, the CEO of Barclays, was called before the Treasury Select Committee. He was asked about the small print. Even though the base interest rate had gone down to 3.5 percent, buried away in the small print was the revelation that Barclaycard was charging 17.9 percent interest.

  “The small print,” Matthew Barrett admitted to the committee, “is an eye test for sure.” Then he added, “I do not borrow on credit cards. It is too expensive.”

  • • •

  I PHONE BARCLAYS again and speak with a press officer. I quote him his CEO’s statement, that the “small print is an eye test for sure.” He laughs and says, “That sounds like Matthew.”

  Then he turns serious and says, in terms of the small print, they have made “huge steps forward in the past twelve to eighteen months. All the credit-card companies have taken out the really important bits from the small print and put them in big letters in the summary box.”

  This sounded comforting. Or at least, it did until the day I attend the International Direct Marketing Fair at Earls Court, West London. This is the junk-mail industry’s annual convention.

  Even though a sign near the door at Earls Court reads “62 percent of consumers agree with the statement ‘I enjoy going through my post,’” the mood here is undeniably panicky. Sue Baker, the PR lady in charge of the event, had told me over the phone, “People are really worried.” More and more consumers are ticking the no box. They don’t want their details passed to third parties.

  “The list is severely compromised,” said Sue.

  An article in today’s Direct Marketing International magazine doomily predicts, “In a couple of years there will be no cold telemarketing industry in Norway. Could this happen here? Well, wake up! It is happening.”

  Six point eight million British people, the article continues, have so far signed up to the telephone preference service, which filters out cold calls.

  Everyone is here, from the brokers and profilers, like Mosaic and Baby Marketing, to the myriad businesses that provide the free gifts contained within junk. There’s a stand displaying sticks of seaside rock that say “First Direct—The Time Has Come to Suck It and See.”

  The idea is that if someone is sent a sweet, they will be more likely to take out a loan.

  • • •

  LIKE A CHILD, I am drawn to the bright colors of the Post-it note stand, where Post-it notes of all the colors of the rainbow are displayed within glass cabinets like rare jewels.

  (It is, by the way, possible that Stanley Kubrick may have influenced 3M’s decision to diversify from their original yellowy-green into other colors. As a great fan of stationery, he once telephoned the head of 3M to suggest they branch out into blues and reds and so on. The man ostentatiously sighed. “If we did, there’d be no end to it,” he said. But it was only a year or two later that the other colors began to appear.)

  “Ever thought about using a Post-it note on a direct mail piece?” asks their publicity material. “Studies show that machine-applying a printed Post-it note can increase your response rate by 18 percent.”

  I ask Peter, who runs the stand, how it works. He shows me a recent piece of junk mail from Capital One. It consists of an offer letter from the credit-card company outlining all the terms and technicalities, the APRs, and the extra charges. Stuck on the front is a bright-yellow Post-it note, which reads:

  This week I will . . .

  Exercise.

  Eat Healthily.

  Sort out my finances. Call Capital One on 0800 . . .

  “See?” says Peter. “The letter has all the technical details. You throw the letter away and keep the Post-it note!”

  • • •

  I CALL RICHARD HOLMES, a spokesperson for Capital One. He says, “By using a Post-it note, we are attempting to highlight the key issue for potential customers, which is to contact Capital One. This initiative in no way seeks to detract from the importance of the terms and conditions which have to be read and signed by anyone applying for a card.”

  • • •

  AN IMAGE KEEPS POPPING into my head. It’s the old days. A customer in need sits down with their bank manager, who says, “A thousand pounds? You must be crazy! I’ll give you three hundred.”

  I wonder: Is there some economic sage out there who effectively invented the new way—someone who drew up a utopian image where banks would fall over one another to loan money to whoever wanted it?

  And so I call Lord Brian Griffiths of Fforestfach. He’s the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, a former director of the Bank of E
ngland, and once the head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit. I’d been told that if anyone could answer that question, he could.

  I ask him if this whole mess can be traced back to one man. I expect him to say something like “Oh, no, it’s far more complicated than that. It is a gradual shift. Nobody is to blame.”

  But he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “I hate to say it, but I was one of the people who argued strongly in favor of it.”

  “When was this?” I ask.

  “December 1970,” he says. “At that time the banks were a classic cartel, very much a middle-class preserve, and I believed that the democratization of credit had to be a good thing. Everyone in principle should have access to credit.”

  So in December 1970, he says, he wrote a paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs advocating a revolution in banking. The report, Competition in Banking, concluded: “The only way in which to make banking a competitive industry is to remove all obstacles to potential new entrants into the industry.”

  It was, by all accounts, a key factor in the subsequent deregulation of UK banking.

  • • •

  IT BECOMES OBVIOUS during my conversation with Lord Griffiths that he’s come to believe he’s unleashed some kind of monster. He says he never could have predicted “the dynamism” with which the lenders would pursue his ideas.

  “The dynamism,” he says. “The innovation.”

  I’ve never heard these words uttered with such sadness.

  “I don’t think anyone would have foreseen how innovative and aggressive and competitive the financial services would become in their techniques,” he says. “The whole lot of them are to blame.” He pauses. “I’m not advocating a return to the status quo. But the pendulum has swung much too far.”

  Now Lord Griffiths has just published a new report—What Price Credit?—which has this somewhat apocalyptic conclusion: “The sheer scale of consumer debt [£1 trillion] has made millions of households extremely vulnerable to shocks to the economy . . . such as oil price rises, acts of terrorism and wars . . . Debt is a time-bomb . . . for the fifteen million people who struggle with repayments.”

  I tell Lord Griffiths about Richard Cullen’s suicide and he sighs.

  “I had a friend,” he replies. “A clergyman. I met him for dinner one night. He was suffering from cancer. He broke down over dinner and confessed to me that he had thirty-two credit cards. He said he was using each card to pay off the charges on the others. He told me about the shame he felt. You could just sense the emotional pressure. I’m no doctor . . .” Lord Griffiths pauses and says, “He died soon afterward.”

  Then he says that a friend of his recently compared the credit-card industry to slavery—that the lenders are the new slave masters, and the borrowers are the slaves.

  I ask Lord Griffiths if he’s bombarded with credit-card junk mail and he says, “Oh yes. I probably get one every fortnight.”

  I say that the Cullens were sometimes getting three or four a day. “Hm,” he says. “I would call one a fortnight bombardment.”

  • • •

  AS I WRITE THIS, in mid-April 2006, the homeless charity Centrepoint has published a report revealing that almost a quarter of homeless youngsters surveyed have been sent letters from credit-card companies urging them to apply for loans, with interest rates as high as 29 percent. Somehow, it seems, the list brokers have been able to buy up the names of young people living in hostels and halfway houses.

  Since I began writing this article, in January, I have paid Visa about £300 in interest and minimum repayments. I keep thinking I should pay my Visa debts off in full and slice the card up. But I haven’t bothered. This is because—like millions of us—I am lazy and stupid.

  • • •

  ON APRIL 26, Wendy and two of her children arrive at Salisbury coroner’s court to hear the verdict. The coroner says the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning: an 85.7 percent saturation.

  “I can tell you, Mrs. Cullen, that is very high,” he says. “That concludes the postmortem evidence. I am satisfied that his intention was to take his own life. Can I also say, Mrs. Cullen . . .”

  Wendy is hoping he’s about to say something critical of the credit-card companies. But instead he says, “Thank you for coming. By gathering here together we do right by your husband. I formally close the inquest.”

  There is one piece of good news. The credit-card companies have all written off the debts now.

  “It makes me sad how easy it was for them to write it off,” one of Richard’s daughters tells me in the corridor outside.

  The Sociopath Mind Guru and the TV Hypnotist

  It is a Friday in April and you’d think some evangelical faith-healing show was occurring in the big brown conference room of the Ibis Hotel in Earls Court, West London. The music is pumping and the six hundred delegates are ecstatic. And it’s true that there are lots of damaged people here who’ve come to be healed. But this is no faith-healing show. The speakers are atheists. And the audience is full of people from British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, British Gas, BT, Bupa, Dixons, the Department for Work and Pensions, Ladbrokes, and Transport for London. These people have come to learn how to be better in the workplace. Now the audience jumps, cheering, to its feet. I look behind me. And I see him passing through the crowd looking like Don Corleone, square-jawed and inscrutable: Richard Bandler.

  Of all the gurus who thrived during the Californian New Age gold rush of the 1970s, Bandler nowadays has by far the biggest influence, on millions of people, most of whom know nothing about him or his extraordinary past. These days nobody bothers much with naked hot-tub encounter sessions, or primal screaming, or whatever. But Bandler’s invention—NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (he’s actually the coinventor with the linguistics professor John Grinder)—is everywhere.

  The training manual we delegates have been handed describes NLP as “a methodology based on the presupposition that all behavior has a structure that can be modeled, learned, taught, and changed.”

  The rest of the manual is a confusing mix of psychobabble and diagrams marked “submodalities” and “kinesthetics,” etc. But from what I can gather, NLP is a way of “repatterning” the human brain to turn us into superbeings—confident, nonphobic, thin superbeings who can sell coals to Newcastle and know what people are thinking just by their eye movements. It is the theory that we are computers and can be reprogrammed as easily as computers can. You were abused as a child? That makes you a badly programmed computer who needs a spot of instant reprogramming. Forget therapy: Just turn off the bit of the brain that remembers the abuse. You aren’t selling enough houses? NLP can instantly reprogram you to become a great salesperson, or public speaker, or whatever. NLP teaches that, like computers, we are a tapestry of telltale visual and auditory clues to what’s going on inside our brains. Our winks, our tics, our seemingly insignificant choice of words—it is all a map of our innermost desires and doubts. It is the secret language of the subconscious. NLP can teach the salesperson how to read that map and act accordingly.

  Some people hail the way NLP has seeped into training programs in businesses across the world. Other people say terrible things about NLP. They say it is a cult invented by a crazy man.

  • • •

  I FIRST HEARD of Richard Bandler, NLP’s inventor (he actually coinvented the technique, with John Grinder), in 2002 when a former U.S. Special Forces soldier told me he’d watched him, two decades earlier, bring a tiny little girl into Special Forces and reprogram her to be a world-class sniper in seconds. Intrigued, I tried to learn more. This is when I heard about the good times, how Bandler’s theories were greeted with high praise in the 1970s and 1980s, how Al Gore and Bill Clinton and practically every Fortune 500 corporate chief declared themselves fans, and then there was the descent into the dark side. Reportedly, during the 1980s, the coked-up Bandler had a habit of telling people he could dial a number and have them killed just like that. Then came the murder trial. In 1988 Ba
ndler was tried and acquitted of murdering a prostitute, Corine Christensen. She’d been found slumped over a dining table, a bullet in her head. Her blood was found sprayed on Bandler’s shirt. And then there was the renaissance in the form of Bandler’s unexpected partnership with the TV hypnotist Paul McKenna, and the fact that they were going to be teaching a course together this week at the Ibis Hotel.

  In the end I will get to meet Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna, and extraordinary things will occur when I do, but the road to those meetings will prove to be a rocky one.

  • • •

  EARLIER TODAY I had coffee with Sue Crowley. She’s been friendly with Paul McKenna for years, since back in the days when he was touring regional theaters, hypnotizing people into believing they were kangaroos. Before that he was a DJ—at Topshop, then Radio Caroline, and finally Capital FM radio. Back then the idea that he’d one day hook up with Richard Bandler would have seemed as likely as David Copperfield becoming business partners with L. Ron Hubbard. But, Sue said, “Paul was like a dog with a bone when he first learned of Richard. He studied him at seminars. He modeled Richard like nobody’s ever modeled anyone before.”

  Modeling is a practice at the heart of NLP. This is how McKenna has described Bandler’s invention of modeling: “If someone’s got a skill that you want to master, you ‘model’ that skill so that you can learn to do what they do in a fraction of the time it took them. Say someone’s a master salesperson. They’ll be doing certain things with their body, and certain things with their language. So you ‘model’ that. Study it, break it down, work out the thinking behind it.”