A hot new brand, a better train service and a kinder role model for harsh times
Here in Old Queen Street, we have (in our editor’s eloquent phrase) said pants to recession by launching a fistful of ‘brand extensions’ this year: our Australian edition, our online Book Club, and the soaraway monthly Spectator Business. Even in the teeth of recession, there are other potent brands out there waiting to be exploited, and the next one I’ve got my eye on is the Bullingdon Club. This Oxford University bad-boys elite, boasting David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson among its former members, has emerged this year as the new nexus of money and power. It already has a brand livery — the club’s sky-blue and ivory tie, with a hint of claret stain — as distinctive as Tiffany blue or Ferrari red. Effortlessly it attracts the kind of publicity that would shift Jermyn Street shoploads of retro-styled wipe-clean evening wear, shooting accessories, ice buckets, cigar-cutters, and little jewelled boxes for snuff and other stimulative powders.
All the new venture needs is a high-profile board of directors drawn from the Bullingdon alumni — but I must say, given the club’s reputation for flamboyant self-exposure, that they were all being rather coy when I put out a call for volunteers through Oxford friends in the City. So I’ll just name my ‘Bullah’ dream-team anyway.
From the 1970s intake I’d have, as chairman, Roddie Fleming, the man who sold his family bank to Chase Manhattan for a boom-time £4.5 billion back in 2000 and started an exclusive finance boutique, Fleming Family & Partners, in a former bishop’s palace in Mayfair. More controversially, my pick for chief executive would be Johnny Cameron, who recently stepped down as ‘chairman of global markets’ at Royal Bank of Scotland and is presumably looking for new career directions.
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