Editor's April Blog
Is it true that when the English get angry we Write A Letter? asked my daughter, as the French poured onto the streets for yet another manif. (demonstration) and a spot of violence.
Barricades and bawling may not be our way but as British sleaze rolls out, you certainly get a feel for what gives other nations their revolutionary inclinations.
While British MPs are busy syphoning taxpayers’ money into their expense accounts to fund fictitious second homes, we learn that the Euro MPs , paying careful attention to their expense forms, can bank a cool couple of million during the course of a parliament. (Gives a new meaning to the words “euro MP”).
Meanwhile, Lord Myners, financial services secretary to the Treasury, is the minister in charge of clamping down on corporate tax avoidance via offshore accounts. And guess what? He himself ran a big tax avoidance company in Bermuda, banking up to 200,000€ a year for his services.
Are we surprised? Of course not: Lord Myners is the bloke who nodded through his mate Freddie Goodwin’s £zillion pension - his reward for bankrupting a bank! (A pot of £16.9 million plus a £1.8 million tax break, if you want the exact figures.)
It’s not clear, however, why Goodwin needs a pension since he is not in the habit of spending his own money. Why would he, when he could spend the bank’s! According to a whistle blower inside RBS, he redecorated the lobby outside his office with “watered silk” wallpaper costing £1, 000 a roll (what is it with high office and multi-million pound wallpaper - remember Lord Chancellor Irvine’s £650,000 refurbishment bill ?) after a cleaner made a brass polish stain on one of the panels. He spent £100,000 a month on part time chauffeurs, flew in fruit from Paris daily and twice re-carpeted his boardrooms with £1 000 per square metre carpet to get the “right shade” of amber. (Now no-one minds if the super rich want to create jobs for drivers and carpet-layers with their own money - you just don’t do it with other people’s.)
Then he ordered the bank to buy some executive parking spaces at the local airport so he wouldn’t have to walk too far from his private jet to the car...
Talk about a let them eat cake scenario. (OK, Marie Antoinette didn’t actually say that.) But you only have to look at the opulence of the Louvre or, in Russia, the Hermitage - (compared to our own little shoe-box sized Buck. Pal.) - to understand why populations turned to murder.
The overt greed of those who are cheerfully bringing economies to their knees is sickening. (As is the raft of big companies going into voluntary administration and then popping up under a different name five minutes later, bankrupting a string of little businesses along the way.)
Whatever happened to the concept of being able to sleep at night?
Happily, revenge is nigh. We may not go in for revolutions but we have our other methods. A grand tradition of puncturing pomp and hypocrisy at the stroke of the pen. Or long lense.
Yes, the rat pack is onto Sir Goodwin. A paparazzi snap of Fred the Shred enjoying himself is now worth more than a pic. of Britney or even Brad, Angelina & the kids. And not only is Sir Fred, now the unacceptable face of the greed which created this recession, in hiding while journalists and photographers decamp from Amy Winehouse’s doorstep to his many doorsteps in the UK and Spain, but a host of other fat cats - like the banker who spent £40,000 in a Soho club just last month - are likewise sweating as the tabloids prepare their ambushes.
The thing is, celebs are pretty canny about how the Press catches them out; greedy bankers don’t know how it works. Some are even checking into places like the Priory in a panic. Don’t we feel sorry for them.
The Press, I assure my daughter, is good for more than printing letters from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. (Although better a letter to the Press than to your local expenses-fiddling MP?) A well-placed titter, a cold shoulder: just as effective as a bullet.
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We are delighted that our January sales were bang on target and February figures even better. So thank you to our readers for your continuing support. Some are having difficulty finding the magazine. It should be alongside other English language publications - ask your newsagent, as there are those who are familiar with their stock and others who aren’t.
Alongside this magazine we are printing a free Going Out & Marketplace supplement and have published the first in a series of Normandy guides (see back cover). Look out for the 65th D-Day Anniversary & Going Out guide, Normandy Restaurants, Depot Vente & Brocantes and Starting a Business in Normandy.
With this raft of initiatives in hand, we will naturally be monitoring closely where your interest lies, adjusting out print schedules accordingly and keeping you informed along the way.
© Published in the April 2009 issue of the Rendezvous magazine.
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