Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s accident-prone ballooning exploits — and for its trenchant thesis that he had ‘toppled from his perch onto a slippery, downward path’, both in business and personal reputation.
But what Bower depicted as ‘the beginning of the end’ for the bearded self-publicist turned out to be rather the opposite. Since the turn of the millenium, Branson has blasted into the stratosphere; not literally, since his equally accident-prone venture in commercial space travel has so far failed to take off, but in the sense that he has attained ever more rarified levels of global celebrity. These days he’s right up with Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, fellow winners of an obscure German prize for humanitarian achievement — and of course he could be spotted grinning and looking casual at Mandela’s funeral. He’s the ultimate role model of concerned entrepreneurship, the eternal hipster who wants to save the ocean as well as busting the cartel of the corporate establishment. At 63, he’s the fun-loving billionaire who claims he’s ‘never been particularly interested in making money’.
His business model has evolved too, no longer a hands-on conglomerate but a smart branding organisation in which ‘partners’ provide most of the capital and take all of the pain. And what a formidable brand Virgin remains, attaching Branson’s own perpetual glamour to every product it touches.
All this is a great annoyance to Bower — the most tireless and unforgiving of British investigative authors, with the scalps of everyone from Tiny Rowland to Bernie Ecclestone already on his belt. He is especially enraged by Branson’s authorship last year of Screw Business as Usual, which sermonises about the importance of ‘doing business in an ethical and transparent manner’.
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