Any other business

One dark evening in October 1994, I was standing in a small meeting room that faced on to Fleet Street, waiting for my last interview before I could escape into the rainy streets. Then a young trader strode in and asked me an unforgettably difficult question: why should Goldman Sachs — for that is where I had applied for a job — bother to spend money training a raw graduate like me to become an investment analyst when it could probably make better returns with a trading programme run by a computer? In light of the awful performance of the investment management industry over the last year and a half, that question has particular pertinence today. It has been debated among finance professionals and academics for many years.

I have the fear. The fear wakes me up at 3 a.m. and for a split second I forget what it is exactly that I’m frightened of. And then I remember. I am a mother and one of my children is off travelling and is on the other side of the world. In the still of the night I prioritise The List. I practise the breathing techniques Betty Parsons taught me when I was first pregnant 24 years ago. The ineffectual huffs and puffs that were supposed to transcend pain. The List catalogues ‘worst case scenarios’ and I systematically shuffle my top five in order of anxiety. I have become the peri-menopausal, female Charles Highway of irrational angst. While The Rachel Papers were concerned with getting the girl, my list deals with how to let her go. I try to rationalise the fear.

History will regard Gerald Ronson as the man who withstood the humiliation of a high-profile trial and conviction, took his punishment without flinching, and returned quietly to his métier of making millions. Speaking from the comfort of his boardroom at Heron, his family’s property empire, the 70-year-old tycoon says, ‘Did I get a black eye, yes; did I take it, yes; and did I come back better than anyone else in the Guinness case? Yes.’ The circumstances were very different when I first met Ronson. This was in 1990, between sessions at Southwark Crown Court. We happened to be travelling in the same lift, he to meet his lawyers, me to file a story. His burly frame was pressed into an ill- fitting suit. He stared fixedly into the distance.

It’s a law of the financial jungle that where there is debt there is desperation and where there is desperation you can sell all manner of dodgy ‘solutions’. Last year, commercial radio stations were full of ads telling us that — thanks to a ‘little-known loophole’ — half our debt could be wiped off if we would just ring the given number. You may even have been cold-called by computers about this fabulous ‘new’ idea. In fact they were just peddling Individual Voluntary Arrangements to the unwary. An IVA is a binding agreement with your creditors under which you pay off a portion of your debts, usually in monthly instalments over five years, in exchange for the writing off of the rest of the debt.

When I was younger (old habits obviously die hard and you have to forgive me for not automatically writing ‘when I was young’ — it’s just going to take a bit more practice), I used to find a particular greeting card amusing. It was a cartoon of a demented-looking career woman. She had one hand clutching her briefcase and the other was held up to her mouth in exaggerated dismay. The caption read: ‘Oh my God, I forgot to have children.’ It made me feel quietly smug as I’d remembered to have my three children by the time I was 30 and it was the career I’d opted to shove on to the back burner. I thought I had nothing much to fear at turning 50. It was just another number.

Lucinda Baring meets Simon Berry, chairman of a 200-year-old company that’s more modern than it looks  Berry Bros & Rudd in St James’s Street epitomises the idea of an old-fashioned wine merchant. Outside, the façade has remained largely unchanged for centuries. Inside, the panelling, desks and uneven wooden floor transport you to an era long gone. And yet this venerable appearance belies the efficient mechanisms of a much more modern business. Other family-run wine merchants have been less successful in updating their brand. Lay & Wheeler, a 150-year-old family business very similar to Berry Bros and perhaps their closest competitor, was bought by Majestic in March, and Avery’s of Bristol, established in 1793, is now owned by Laithwaites.

As London’s mayor, Sir Alan, you’d be a mere apprentice A recent poll placed Sir Alan Sugar as the leading independent candidate to be the next mayor of London. His statement that ‘...observing the past mayor, Livingstone, and Boris, the current one, I’m confident that it would be a walk in the park for me’, tempted me, just for a moment, to wish him success — until I realised the likely effect on London. Why is it that so many successful businessmen think government is a part-time job and something they can handle with ease? Is that why so few have succeeded? It is for others to say whether or not I succeeded in government: at least I was able to choose the time of my own departure without the press hounding me out.

David Crow meets Mike Lynch, the computer scientist whose firm, Autonomy, makes software that knows how humans think — and can spot when they’re committing fraud The plush Piccadilly offices of Autonomy are decorated with complex mathematical equations, written in buzzing neon lights and frosted onto glass doors. Although the formulas underpin technology that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, they were first penned by an 18th-century vicar, Thomas Bayes, who spent his life trying to prove the existence of God through mathematics. ‘He never succeeded,’ Autonomy founder and chief executive Mike Lynch tells me, ‘although he probably has an answer by now.