Morning:
8°c
To Chichester, to watch the knockout production of Enron, which transfers to the Royal Court this month. Sam West, who plays the company CEO Jeffrey Skilling, says that audiences commonly ask why nothing was learned from the Enron morality tale. As a Left-winger, he equates the role of "an unrepentant free marketer like Skilling" with playing Nazis or paedophiles.
Charismatic villains are usually more entertaining to watch than the virtuous and Skilling, as West says, is a "stonking part". In this production none of the main characters is nice, so it is an absolute romp. This is all fair to the facts.
Yet, to answer the question why were lessons not learned? Well, risk and vision and free markets are not self evidently ruinous. Skilling was, in his own words, "fxxxxxg smart".
Businesses and organisations tend to divide into About People, or About Ideas. At an early moral crossroads in the play, the Enron chairman Ken Lay chooses Skilling's "vision" over his female rival's "people skills".
Skilling's idea that Enron could realise potential future profits in the instant was mainstream thinking during the dotcom boom. His restless search for new markets and business models sounded ingenious. Even his lunatic suggestion that you could trade weather had a certain abstract appeal. Aren't carbon credits a variation on this?
Are visionaries too dangerous to assume power? The Iraq War was a consequence of a brilliant intellectual theory. There was a beauty to the strategy of the mathematician-turned-neo conservative Paul Wolfowitz. He calculated that the Saddam regime was brittle and would fall, that America could enter and leave quickly and Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction. The venture would create a domino effect in the region, creating an unstoppable wave of democracy.
The reality was not the same as the theory and it took a soldier, Colin Powell, to remind Wolfowitz of the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. In the end Skilling was betrayed by the markets, which are like the fates: no wonder Enron is described as a corporate Macbeth.
The giveaway phrase that shows visionaries are actually madmen is "changing the world". When Tony Blair began promising that he could "sort" the world, it was time to yank him out of Downing Street. The neo cons, much like Jeffrey Skilling, were charmed by new world orders and pinkish dawns.
Yet without radical thinking - and a faith in free markets - Margaret Thatcher would not have saved Britain from defeatism and a three-day week. Even so she watered down the ideas of intellectuals such as Keith Joseph.
Without modern vision we would not have the internet. If Rupert Murdoch did not take risks we might not have view-on-demand. There was some irritation that the Financial Services Authority's Adair Turner chose to raise his idea of bank taxes in Prospect magazine last week rather than the FT. It sounded to me wise to keep ideas within an intellectual forum. John Varley, Barclays Chief Executive, said in an interview with the BBC's Robert Peston yesterday that his early faults were to do with being "over intellectual". There is a whiff of cordite when intellectuals put their ideas into practice without any checks or balances. Look at Karl Marx.
Thus James Murdoch's vision of a differently ordered media world under the great Sky is much more alarming to me than the "Orwellian" BBC.
Beware "fxxxxxg smart" men in suits.
The Carnival ambivalence
Among the graffiti on the boarded-up window of Paul Smith's shop on the corner of Kensington Park Road yesterday was a message from the designer: “Enjoy the Carnival, love Paul x.”
It encapsulated the local ambivalence towards the Notting Hill Carnival. Residents of some of the most expensive streets in London tend to flee: those who stay to watch do so in a state of siege. One resident I know looked out of his front door to see a woman defecating on his steps.
Yet for the rest of us, the carnival remains an expression of the spirit of London and the good will of mankind (until about 8pm). I applauded the floats and then legged it to the pleasant suburbs of Hammersmith before the bass music ripped out my lungs and the dust choked my throat.
Alive and buzzing: London's scooter wars
Peter Townshend is photographed on a jolly red Vespa in Richmond, looking a very long way from Quadrophenia. The fact that he then pushed it through his front door for safe-keeping is also at odds with the image of fearless youth. Don't be fooled though. London is still the wild west for scooters. The increase in the population of scooter owners and the lack of parking places has created a Malthusian tension.
Recently, I found a note on my Vespa accusing me of hogging a place in the little bay and of moving all the other vehicles to secure my pole position. I was stung with aggrieved righteousness. First, my bike is parked by 5.15am each morning. Second, how had I become Kensington's Schwarzenegger, hurling bikes out of my path?
I have all the scars from scooter wars, torn off mirrors, broken seat, scratched bodywork. I just hope Townshend knows what he is letting himself in for.
Central bone of contention
At the Proms the other evening, I was chatting to two women who worked for a media company in Clerkenwell. They were delighted to be watching the Brahms violin concerto but were mildly disgruntled by their journey to the Albert Hall. They wished the Proms could be in central London.
Kensington seemed bang on central to me, living in Hammersmith, but their compass was set in King's Cross, convenient for the City, the West End and mainland Europe. When a tourist asks me for a hotel in “central London” I always say it depends what they mean by central.
