Conflict of Interest

1

Chris Treiger would never forget the eight words that changed his life. He’d been working late at the office, one night in early July, when the phone rang. As soon as he heard the ebullient voice at the other end, he’d wondered how to cut short the call. Bill Brewster, a high-pressure PR head-hunter, had been hounding him for weeks about a phenomenal career opportunity, paying vast sums of money, for which he was ideally suited. Chris had heard it all before. At thirty-two years of age and MIRA’s youngest director, he got calls from recruitment agents every month – and with offers a lot more appealing than working for some PR shop.

Chris had already told Brewster he wasn’t interested. But the head-hunter was back – and making a virtue of his persistence. He didn’t usually try to change people’s minds, he declared, it was just that in this case the fit was so perfect he would be doing Chris the greatest disservice if he didn’t at least suggest that Chris reconsider. Wasn’t it worth an initial meeting?

It was then that Chris had made his tactical error. ‘It might,’ he conceded, looking out at where the summer sun still burned above the horizon, even though it was past eight o’clock, ‘but I’m really up against it right now and I don’t have time to run all over town—’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have to.’ Brewster was triumphant. ‘Lombard is just two streets away from you.’

Chris was wondering how to regain control of a conversation which had gone off the rails when Brewster came out with his eight, life-changing words – eight words to which Chris had returned many times in his head, marvelling at the perverse logic of them. Eight words, in the form of a question, to which there was only one possible answer: ‘Isn’t your career worth a hundred-yard walk?’ Brewster had asked.

Chris hadn’t given the interview a lot of thought by the time he was due to go into Lombard. Of course he’d heard stories about the agency. Who hadn’t? But he’d done nothing to prepare for the meeting. In fact he was irritated with himself for caving in to Brewster’s hype, and couldn’t see how anything Lombard might come up with could be of the slightest interest to him. He was doing well for himself at MIRA, and even if the money wasn’t brilliant, his career was rewarding in other ways, which was more than could be said for most of his former Oxford contemporaries.

While they had been cramming at intensive training courses run by Goldman Sachs in New York, or Andersen’s in Chicago or McKinsey’s in Piccadilly, Chris had signed up with the polling company MIRA. Market Intelligence and Research Analysis was a global organisation whose voter surveys gave it a high public profile; around election time, no article about voting intentions was complete without the latest MIRA polling result. As one of MIRA’s brightest new recruits, Chris had soon found himself involved in the more intellectually challenging aspects of the business. In fact, he’d devised a new way of defining voters according to attitude and lifestyle, which had been hailed as a breakthrough by the market research industry – and quickly branded the MIRA Psychographic Map™ by his employers. It had attracted a level of interest Chris found extraordinary. Political parties from all over the world had soon been hammering on his door, and so too had all the other players in political drama: spin-doctors, advertising agencies and newspaper columnists. Chris soon found himself being quoted in the press and invited to speak at conferences. He’d be phoned at all hours of the day and night by political reporters chasing a sound bite, or an appearance on TV. His clean-cut good looks – clear, blue eyes, closely cropped dark hair, sensitive features – and his personable delivery made him a popular commentator.

Chris’s bosses at MIRA had given him his own office and an impressive title, and commissioned him to devise psychographic maps for companies and brands. Despite his relative youth, he had become regarded as something of a guru among MIRA’s expanding client base, his divinatory powers sought by captains of industry and those who advised them. Chris relished the role and played it for all it was worth. He became adept at forming the kind of pronouncements that attracted greatest interest from clients and the media – which had also prompted the steady stream of head-hunters to call. But his remuneration at MIRA was a frustration; even as a director, and one of its highest paid executives, his earnings didn’t begin to reflect the new business he’d brought into the firm.

Traditionalists on the MIRA Board clung to the notion that salary was a product of age and experience, and saw in Chris a bright young man with ideas well above his station. He, meantime, saw no reason why contribution to profits shouldn’t translate directly into personal reward. A parting of the ways might become inevitable – although Chris had never, for a moment, thought that salvation was to be found at Lombard.

Even though Lombard was the largest and most powerful PR firm in the City, with more FTSE 100 companies than any other, Chris had no interest at all in being a PR man. And if he had, Lombard would never have occurred to him as a place to work. For quite apart from its size and influence, Lombard and its founder, Mike Cullen, had a reputation about which Chris was decidedly ambivalent. ‘Cullen has created the Hitler Youth of PR’ he remembered someone once saying. The phrase had stuck with him – it seemed to sum up all that he’d subsequently heard about the agency.

Mike Cullen had founded Lombard on the simple premise that to build up the best client list in the business you had to hire the best people in the business – no matter how much they cost. It wasn’t long before the stringent requirements Lombard demanded of potential employees came to be known in City circles, and the term ‘Lomboid’ gained currency. To be a Lomboid was to be extremely good-looking and have immense charm, to possess a firs

t-class degree and a capacity for ferociously hard work. To be a Lomboid was to be fluent with figures, charismatic in presentations, and brilliant on paper. To be a Lomboid was to be supremely self-confident, with a firm view on every major political and economic issue, as well as familiarity with the menu of every up-market eatery in London. To be a Lomboid, in short, was to be as much like Mike Cullen as possible.

Lomboids didn’t just act the same – they dressed the same too. A formal dress code applied, with the PR world’s Adonises dressed in dark suits and white shirts – always dark suits and white shirts – from Mike Cullen’s preferred tailor and shirt-maker in Savile Row and Jermyn Street respectively. The Aphrodites meantime wore Donna Karan as standard kit.

The consultancy Cullen had created in his own image had soon acquired a mystique which major City players couldn’t help but notice. As Cullen’s storm troopers marched through boardroom after boardroom, their diplomacy and intelligence and winsome good looks sweeping an array of blue-chip companies into their arms, even those who cracked jokes about Lomboids did so nervously. Because there was something about Mike Cullen’s unswerving self-belief, fostered in all those who worked for him, which was patently self-fulfilling.

Lombard did things differently. Lombard consultants never travelled anywhere by taxi. A limousine service provided a chauffeured Jaguar to ferry the demigods to and from client meetings. When Lombard held its annual staff party, it didn’t bring in caterers to circulate Bollinger and crab-meat vol-au-vents, it sent all its staff to party in New York – First Class. And while middle-ranking clients were treated to lunches in Terence Conran diners and Marco Pierre White gastrodomes, Britain’s most powerful corporate warriors were entertained in Lombard’s own penthouse dining room, where spectacular views of Tower Bridge afforded an appropriate vista for the even more triumphal creations of the full-time chef Mike Cullen had poached from Kensington Palace.

And then there was the secrecy. While other PR firms like Brunswick and Financial Dynamics rarely told newspaper reporters much about themselves, Lombard, predictably, took things a step further; it refused all interviews. No one working for Mike Cullen was under any illusion that the merest hint to a journalist about even the most anodyne aspect of life at Lombard was grounds for instant dismissal. In more than fifteen years at Lombard, Mike Cullen had not once been quoted in any trade or national newspaper. Lombard refused even to allow its name to appear in industry league tables – even though its fee revenue would have easily placed it in the top slot. Lombard conducted no advertising. It had no company brochure. So insistent was its pursuit of invisibility that its name didn’t appear on its own stationery, which provided only an address and other contact details. Lombard consultant business cards were similarly anonymous. And enterprising journalists who tried to mine for information at Companies House, where every limited company in Britain is obliged to lodge its annual accounts, soon found that no trace of it was to be detected – Lombard had been incorporated within a convoluted trail of off-shore arrangements so that it was not required to submit a single piece of paper to any place of public record.

The effect of this extreme secrecy was, naturally, fame of the most potent kind. In an industry of mammoth egos, to seek no attention was far more effective than shouting from rooftops. Because nobody knew what went on at Lombard, they could only speculate. When Lombard’s golden wunderkind en were sighted in the back of their racing-green Jaguars, whispers would circulate about which company they were moving in on, where they were about to strike next. PR rivals, with little inkling of the nature of the beast they were up against, had only rumours with which to second-guess their competitor – and there were rumours aplenty, of the most terrifying kind.

Chris recalled some of the tales of Lombard mythology the evening he made the notional hundred-yard walk – which turned out to be three hundred yards, and why was he not surprised? – for his appointment with a Lombard director, Kate Taylor. After being screened by uniformed security guards behind a black marble desk – a lot more rigorous, he couldn’t help noticing, than the usual security check – he was shown through to Lombard reception. It was a vast, softly lit, sumptuously furnished atrium, which appropriately gave no impression at all of the kind of organisation that moved behind its burgundy moiré walls. The impression it did give was one of hushed reverence, confirming the notion that this was the hallowed ante-chamber to an organisation of immense, unseen influence. Glancing round at the symphony of magnificent oils, gilt-framed mirrors and damask curtains, Chris couldn’t but be impressed. The subdued semi-darkness deepened the effect of brooding power, and was interrupted only by two shafts of light, beaming down from a vaulted ceiling on to the immaculate blonde heads of the two Vogue-like glamour girls at Reception.

Inviting him to make himself comfortable on one of the sofas, they phoned through for Kate Taylor. No sooner had Chris made himself comfortable with the Financial Times, however, than one of the receptionists called over to tell him there was a change of plan – instead of Kate Taylor, she announced in an expensive, Roedean accent, he was to meet the Chairman, Mike Cullen. Well, this came as a surprise, thought Chris, the prospect of suddenly finding himself face to face with the legendary PR man making him feel, by turn, self-conscious then irritated. So what if it was Mike Cullen? He wasn’t interested in PR and he didn’t want the job anyway.

Minutes later he was in the lift, going up to the Boardroom on the fifth floor. As the doors slid open, he stepped into a room dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows, offering a panoramic view of Tower Bridge, the Thames, the City. Dusk was falling and with no lamps turned on in the room, one couldn’t escape a sense of sweeping omniscience looking out on a scene of such history and splendour. Mike Cullen was standing by the window at the far end of the room, and turned towards the lift as Chris appeared. He was taller than Chris had thought he would be, and broad-shouldered, a lustrous crop of silvering hair brushed back from well-defined, handsome features. His suit was dark charcoal and his shirt was indeed white, with a button-down collar and the Windsor knot in his tie as crisp as though he had just stepped out of his dressing room. On his way up Chris had wondered if Mike Cullen would strike him as Machiavellian or arrogant or intensely driven. But as Cullen stretched out his hand towards him now, Chris realised he hadn’t reckoned on the PR man’s charm. Mike Cullen possessed an aura of such openness and familiarity, it was as though they had already known each other for years.

Cullen offered him a drink. Had he wanted the job, Chris supposed, he would have asked for something soft. But as he didn’t, he opted for gin and tonic. Cullen splashed out two large measures from a blue bottle of Bombay Sapphire. ‘How did you find our recruitment man?’ he enquired, clunking blocks of ice into the crystal tumblers.

‘Very … insistent,’ Chris responded.

‘Why we use him.’ Cullen brought over the drinks. ‘But I’m very pleased you decided to come.’ He sat opposite Chris, raising his glass before sipping. ‘You probably think that working here is a bit tangential to what you’re doing at the moment,’ he began, ‘but the point is, I’m not offering you a job in PR.’

Chris was taken aback by Cullen’s directness. Not that he had any intention of showing it.

‘Do you know the first dictum of our business?’ Cullen leaned towards him confidentially. ‘“Know Thine Enemy”.’ He regarded Chris closely. ‘Of course, all our clients start off thinking PR is about getting them a good press. But that’s less than half the story. Managing the way the media deal with their competitors is just as important. But to get there, you first need to know about competitor plans, strategies, how they’re seen in the market – ‘he gestured broadly, ‘all the stuff you know inside out.’

It was a train of thought Chris hadn’t expected. He wondered where Cullen would end up.

‘I saw the work you did for Glaxo. Very impressive.’

How on earth had he got hold of that report? It had been top secret and completed only the week before.

‘We’d like to do work like that for all our clients. We want to create a new role here, a new team, to feed into the rest of the business at the highest level. To cut to the chase, I want you to be Lombard’s first Director of Research and Planning.’