The least the Great Bank Robbers can do is hand back their loot

A crowd screaming for revenge is never a pretty sight, whether it is on the streets of some foreign city or the pages of the British press.

Nevertheless, it seems unfair that those convicted of the £2.6 million Great Train Robbery in 1963 copped 30 years in jail, while those responsible for the trillion pound Great Bank Robbery of 2008 remain not just at large but enjoying honours and plutocratic lifestyles derived from their entirely illusory “success”.

Running a bank hardly seems the most challenging job in the world, provided one applies a bit of common sense. Such as only lending money to individuals and companies who stand a sporting chance of being able to pay it back, even if the economy takes a turn for the worse.

In this context, it helps to be experienced enough to know that any politician who claims to have abolished boom and bust is utterly delusional.

As that damning Parliamentary report observed last week, Halifax Bank of Scotland was not a complicated business brought down by too-clever-by-half investment bankers or felled as collateral damage from the global financial collapse. It would have gone bust anyway because those in charge took irresponsible risks.

Since all of us are going to be paying for this mess through our taxes for years to come, it does not seem entirely equitable that one of the individuals chiefly responsible should be allowed to walk away with a cool £25 million in his pension fund, having retired at the implausibly early age of 50 a couple of years before the wheels fell off.

Sir, sorry Mr, James Crosby

The cult of comparative youth gives us chief executives at 40 who cannot possibly be expected to hold such high pressure jobs for more than a decade. And Prime Ministers of a similar age who have never held any real job outside politics and reach the top after less than ten years in Parliament.

With the utmost respect, how can anyone without the experience of things going wrong the last time around be expected to make the right decisions to prevent it happening again?

One of my first assignments as a junior PR executive was the flotation of a computer leasing company. I met huge scepticism from cynical old hacks who explained to me why this sort of business was doomed to go bust. I was well equipped with a sheaf of counter-arguments on why it was all going to be different this time around.

And guess what? It wasn’t.

All the fuss about corporate governance in recent years has completely failed to stop top executive pay being ratcheted up to such an extent that it has completely lost touch not only with the rewards available to the average worker, but with reality itself. But it has ensured the compulsory retirement of experienced non-executive directors on the grounds that they have been on boards too long to be “independent”.

Instead of fussing about boardroom diversity, the focus should be on making more room towards the top for those with experience, scepticism and an aversion to greed. At the very least these older folk could play the role of the slave in Roman triumphs, whispering reminders of their mortality in the ears of the people in charge.

I will admit that it may not work. I spent much of the weekend trying to instruct my three-year-old on how to operate his electric train set. As usual, my warnings were dismissed with the confident assertion that “The thing is, Daddy, I know all about trains”. A spectacular crash duly ensued.

But at least when the Parliamentary report on the next British corporate train wreck comes to be written, there will be a few more greybeards around to utter the words “I told you so”.

As for those who baled out at 50 from a high-flying business that then plunged spectacularly to earth, the only honourable course is surely to hand back the loot. As an elderly striver myself, I can assure you that you are not too old to make a fresh start, ideally in an area more suited to your talents.

I haven’t seen a whelk stall in years so a highly suitable gap in the market clearly exists.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally NOT published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, because it was due to appear on Tuesday 9 April and wasn't about Margaret Thatcher.

Now, what was I trying to remember?

Somewhere in my filing cabinet of curiosities lies the death certificate of a great-grandparent who apparently expired of “old age and decay”. He was around the same age that I am now.

I was reminded of this when an eager young stockbroker visited me on Friday to fill in one of those almost endless and certainly mindless box-ticking forms that regulators in every field now demand to save us from ourselves.

“Would you still describe yourself as semi-retired?” he asked. I shook my head and, in answer to the obvious follow-up, gestured around the bombsite that is my sitting room, strewn with toddler-related detritus.

He did not even bother to wait for a reply to the question “When do you plan to retire?” He just smiled sympathetically.

I am doing my best to earn more, but as I do so I am increasingly struck by the following paradox. On the one hand we are all being told that we must work for longer, as life expectancy steadily increases and pension funds buckle under the combined strain of longevity, lousy stock market performance and Gordon Brown’s half-witted tax raid on their resources.

Yet at precisely the same time, the optimum age for earning serious money grows ever lower. Every major political party in this country is now led by someone (a man, harrumph, or rather harriet-umph!) under the age of 45. More relevantly to me, the average age of a FTSE-100 chief executive is 52. Why would anyone choose an adviser older then themselves, when they could so easily find one who is younger, fitter and considerably more attractive?

The traditional answer used to be: experience. There is good reason to think that our current financial hole would be considerably shallower if there had been more people around who could remember that property and other financial bubbles always burst one day, and that the proper reaction to any claim to have abolished boom and bust is hollow laughter followed by a robust swipe with a blunt instrument.

But sadly it appears that my analogue experience has little relevance in the digital world, where the relentless advance of technology requires a cult of youth because only the young understand it. They may have a point. My son Charlie is not yet 16 months old and has already discovered functions in our mobile phones and remote controls of which we were blissfully ignorant.

However, it does raise the problem of how on earth we are supposed to keep working until we drop if we aren’t actually equipped to do anything useful. I have only ever possessed a modest talent for stringing words together, combined with a ferociously good short-term memory. This gave me a wholly unfair advantage in passing the sort of exams by which intelligence used to be indexed.

Now my memory is fading as fast as the snows on Kilimanjaro. My doctor quickly gave me a comforting diagnosis when I went to see him the other day about some skin blemishes. I repeated his words to myself on the 15-minute drive home, but when my wife asked me what they were I could still manage nothing better than “umm … something to do with carrots”.

I had to go on the internet to look up the real name of my non-cancerous growths: seborrhoeic keratoses. And I was only able to track that down because my doctor had laughingly mentioned the name by which they used to be known before political correctness took hold: senile warts.

So here I am, clearly well advanced on the path to old age and decay, my mind palpably going, but still in need of paid employment until I’m 80, in competition with all those people who are about to be downsized from the public sector or eased off benefits.

Any bright ideas, Prime Minister Whatsisname?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The most dangerous age is now 43

How do you tell when you are getting past it? For my parents the key marker was policemen, whose increasing youthfulness caused gloomy comment every time they fired up the Ford Consul for a weekend run to Druridge Bay.

With me it is business leaders and politicians. Never mind new appointments; these days people far younger than I am are retiring as chief executives after hugely rewarding stints at the top.

As for party leaders, when Gladstone made his great comeback in the Midlothian campaign of 1879-80 he was 70 and had been in Parliament since 1832. The current head of Gladstone’s party is 43 (though he looks younger) and has been an MP for five minutes, sorry, years.

While Gladstone barnstormed to victory through a series of lengthy open-air speeches reaching maybe 90,000 people, Mr Clegg has attained pole position in this election with just two 90-minute TV appearances.

If the Young Pretender really does have the keys to Number 10 at his disposal, how will he play his hand? I think we can guess the quality of his negotiating skills from the fact that Mr Clegg is an atheist and his wife a Catholic; their three children are being raised as Catholics.

Similarly, Mrs Clegg (as she apparently prefers not to call herself) is Spanish, while Mr Clegg is at least partially British (his own website draws attention to his Dutch mother and half-Russian father); their sons are called Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.

If his evident assertiveness with his very own European partner is anything to go by, we may surely conclude that “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” is one of the better polished phrases in the four EU languages in which Mr Clegg prides himself in being fluent.

Yet being an accommodating “New Man” seems to be considered a sure-fire turn-on for the voters. David Cameron, also 43 and from an eerily similar privileged background, works hard to project himself as young, hip and cool, getting down with the kids and surrounding himself with babes, whether for kissing in their prams or as Tory candidates in winnable seats.

Where is the voice of experience when you need it? Oh yes, there is Gordon Brown, but then his experience was creating the mess we are all in now, which is hardly the strongest argument for giving him our support.

It seems ironic that, as the average lifespan stretches out towards 100, we apparently believe that people will do their best work before they are even halfway there. Tony Blair entered Downing Street at 43: a truly alarming precedent.

Will we ever again have an octogenarian Prime Minister like Gladstone, Palmerston or Churchill? It is certainly not the way to bet, particularly after the going-over suffered by Mr Clegg’s geriatric predecessor Sir Menzies Campbell, forcibly retired at 66. Would that be why the long-serving Sir Alan Beith (67) seems to have become more or less invisible in this campaign?

Whether you are appointing a PR man, financial adviser, chief executive or Prime Minister, choosing someone who cannot remember the last time that things went really horribly wrong greatly increases the chances of it happening again. This time, someone with experience of getting things surprisingly right should be in pole position. What a shame Kenneth Clarke is both 69 and an unabashed euro fanatic.

I must conclude with a sincere apology to Mr Clegg for my egregious error last week in suggesting that he attended the same school as that unbearable toff George Osborne. I knew that Mr Clegg went to the academically distinguished and socially exclusive Westminster School. My lazy error was to believe that Mr Osborne did, too, when he actually went to St Paul’s. Which is no doubt why his nickname in Oxford’s deeply unlovely Bullingdon Club was “Oik”.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.