James Buchan

This book found me in the midst of a prolonged, if not necessarily profound, contemplation of the market for insurance and reinsurance known as Lloyd’s of London. What interests me about Lloyd’s is not the misfortunes it suffered in the late Eighties or its spectacular losses, the evident incompetence of its professionals and functionaries or its silly building, but the conduct of the passive investors in the market known as the External Names, about thirty thousand families of the English and Scots high middle class.

On the evening of 19 October 1992, the decomposed bodies of Petra Karin Kelly and Gerd Bastian were found by police in the bedroom of the small house they shared in the village of Tannenbusch on the outskirts of Bonn. They had been dead for about three weeks. Both had been shot in the head with bullets from a little Derringer pistol. On the morning of the 20th, a Tuesday, the police announced they were certain that ‘no third person was responsible for their deaths.’

The story of how the secrets of explosive plutonium fission were spirited away from the United States to this country has if anything increased in interest in recent years. Alongside its narrative appeal – the improvisation and mathematics, the bureaucratic squabbles and triumphs, the precision engineering of high explosive – the scientific campaign that ended in the Hurricane test at the Monte Bello islands off Australia’s west coast on 3 October 1952 also dramatises the yearning and anxiety in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you … the fact that you and your team have made it possible for Britain to make and store atom bombs has made the country a world power once again.’

On 24 January, a Tuesday, Mr Cedric Brown, chief executive of British Gas, testified before the House of Commons Committee on Employment on the subject of his pay, which is £475,000 a year. In the course of a brisk and competitive exchange with MPs, he showed emotion at only one point, when he said this:

There is a passage in The Wealth of Nations where the author, for a moment, expresses some regret for the world of economic expediency he so devotedly describes and justifies. The division of labour, whose language is money, helps us to prosperity and liberty but at the price of atomising our picture of the world. The labourer, Smith writes, is ‘not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of the country he is altogether incapable of judging.’ Anyone who has dined recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable.