Rupert Steiner

Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost anonymous giant in Val Gooding, its 56-year-old chief executive. She is Britain’s second most powerful female boss, but with very little of the profile many of her male counterparts court and enjoy. Over the past ten years Gooding has turned Bupa around, grown its market share, produced record results and built the business into a rare world brand.

It’s not that the Saudis aren’t pleased to see foreign visitors, it’s just that they use the first possible opportunity to issue a death threat. ‘Traffickers will be killed’ promises the landing card distributed before we touch down in Jeddah. It’s a reminder of Saudi Arabia’s tough stance on crime and its direct approach to business, even drug-smuggling business. But for those blue-chips interested in rather more mainstream corporate endeavours, opportunities in Saudi Arabia are booming. The oil-rich kingdom is offering more than £624 billion worth of contracts in defence, transport and infrastructure to international firms.

In the bookcase in George Soros’s South Kensington drawing-room, neatly lined up beside works on Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Popper, are multiple copies of Open Society, written by one of today’s aspiring philosophers: Soros himself. The literary line-up is testament to the Hungarian–American billionaire’s search for something that money can’t buy — acceptance at the same table as these great thinkers. But his cash has paid for a place on the same shelf, at least in his own home. And last week Soros was in London to talk about his latest book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror (Weidenfeld).

The Rosewall affair signifies everything that is wrong with Royal Mail. The two-and-a-half ton Rosewall sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth was acquired by the Ministry of Works and the Post Office in 1963 for a new Post Office Pension Fund building in Chesterfield, where it became a landmark — until last October, when it took a trip to the Bonhams saleroom in London. Royal Mail announced that Rosewall was no longer part of its ‘cultural heritage’, which of course had nothing to do with the £620,000 it was expected to raise at auction. But after much protest it was withdrawn from sale and repatriated to Chesterfield, presumably along with a very large haulage bill.