Conflict of Interest

Then, over the vintage port and cigars, the performance of every member of agency staff was reviewed and a bonus awarded. Billing hours were, of course, at the heart of all this, but other things counted too. If a consultant was cruising at sixty hours a week, but was directly responsible for bringing in a new £300k client, he could expect at least a £30k pat on the back. Conversely, the ninety-hour-a-week Lomboid whose client had been gobbled up in a takeover could expect little but sympathy – and a not-so-subtle hint that it was time to polish his new business shoes. All the time individual bonuses were debated, Mike Cullen’s secretary went to and fro, inserting figures into letters that had already been prepared. The process could take two, three, four hours.

And then the gods would descend from the Boardroom, envelopes would be handed out to all staff, and the agency would erupt in an orgy of celebration. And like everything else, when Lombard celebrated, it did it bigger and ballsier than anyone else. Brand new Ferraris, Maseratis and MGs would be summoned from sports car dealerships in the City, to be delivered, in a gleaming line-up, outside Lombard offices that very afternoon. Weekend Concorde trips to New York would be hastily arranged. Property deals would be struck, with seven-figure loft conversions changing hands, sight unseen. Bonus Fridays were one of the few times of the year when clients found their advisers at Lombard unusually difficult to get hold of.

Chris was inputting hours into his time sheet for his first week when Charlotte poked her head round the door.

‘Everything OK?’ she enquired.

‘My first time sheet,’ Chris pulled a face.

‘Ah. You’re in creative mode then?’ She stepped into the room and walked to his desk.

Charlotte and he had relaxed into a convivial relationship after he’d bought her dinner one night when she’d stayed till nine-thirty. He’d quickly discovered that behind the carefully cultivated image of relentless efficiency and impossible glamour, Charlotte – now Lotte to him – had a decidedly risqué sense of humour. After a fair few glasses of wine, droll observations about colleagues had been exchanged, and personal lives shared. Back in the office next morning, things had changed between them in a subtle, but important way.

‘I’m supposed to be creative?’ he asked now.

‘Once you’ve been here a couple of weeks I’m sure you’ll be billing the most incredible hours,’ she grinned.

Chris leaned across his desk, speaking sotto voce, “You mean, double-billing?’

‘Double-billing?’ She adopted an expression of mock-contempt. “Think big.’

‘I see.’ Chris smiled.

‘Let me introduce you to the concept of Lombard Time.’ She met his eyes with a twinkle. ‘You see, there’s other PR agencies’ time, and then there’s Lombard Time. Because people who work at Lombard are cleverer and better connected and more effective than everyone else, we get things done in half the time. But that doesn’t mean we only charge them for half our time. We charge them the full whack – that’s how we make our money.’

Lombard Time, Chris soon learned, was a tacitly agreed concept throughout the agency. However many hours consultants worked, their time sheets recorded even more. A morning’s work drafting press releases translated into a full day on the time keeping sheet. A ten-minute telephone conversation was marked down as an hour.

But along with this discovery, Chris also came to learn just why Lombard clients were prepared to pay so handsomely for the services of their PR agency; media control was what Lombard boldly declared it could provide, and media control was what clients got. Lombard virtually ran the City desks of most national newspapers, feeding them most of their stories which would appear, with all the right nuances, in the next day’s papers. Non-business news would be fed through to the domestic news editors, the political or environmental editors, appearing with apparent effortless ease in articles and columnist reviews. Consumer stories would be placed in Sunday supplements, lifestyle magazines and TV programmes. Despite being well versed in the ways of the media before he joined, even Chris was amazed at how much of what passed for ‘editorial’ comment and reportage was material that had come

directly off Lombard desks.

And if there was one thing Lombard was better at than getting good stories into the papers, it was keeping bad stories out. Blood-letting in the boardroom, analyst jitters, sales slumps after new product launches; all these were the stuff of headlines that none of Lombard’s clients ever wanted to see – and rarely did with the well-oiled Lombard machine at their disposal. Lombard executives would use the leverage of their massive client list, without compunction, to lean on journalists who were tempted to stray beyond what was deemed desirable. What’s more, they always made sure they had at least one tempting tale to offer by way of a replacement, if negative mentions could be avoided altogether.

At the heart of Lombard’s frenetic media management was Monitoring Services. From behind the Level Three security barrier on the third floor would flow a steady stream of missives and telephone calls throughout the day to various Lombard staff. ‘Alex Carter at The Herald is planning a piece on generic drugs for next Monday’, a note might read, ‘Plug for one of your pharma clients?’ Or ‘Alert! Sue Horley at Guardian writing damaging piece on Elpane Industries. Urgent call.’ Lombard consultants would quickly swing into action, neutralising damage and exploiting whatever opportunities presented themselves.

Chris couldn’t but be impressed by the efficiency of the operation and, in particular, by the accuracy of Monitoring Services’ notes.

‘How on earth do they do it?’ he’d asked Kate Taylor, when a briefing meeting had been interrupted by a telephone call from Monitoring, advising one of Kate’s staff that his client was about to be roasted by The Times.

‘That’, she’d looked at him pointedly, ‘is something none of us is encouraged to investigate too closely. It’s their job to get us the edge over everyone else – including the media.’

Intense, money-driven competition was the energy that propelled everyone at Lombard. It was the reason Mike Cullen had picked him to work as Research and Planning Director. And work he did. In two weeks he’d put in more assignments than he had in six at MIRA. There were journalist audits, analyst trackers and corporate image studies. He commissioned focus groups, panel studies and ad hoc quantitative projects.

But of all the projects Chris was working on, he never had any doubt about which was the most important; he’d been briefed on it his very first day, an assignment so secret it was to be referred to only by its code name: Project Silo. Summoned along the corridor, and through an anteroom where Cullen’s secretary Rosa and her assistant presided over a flurry of fax machines, photocopiers and word processing, he was shown into the Chairman’s office. It was his first visit and he couldn’t but be impressed. One floor beneath the Boardroom, Cullen’s office was at the end of the building, and the entire end wall was glass, floor to ceiling, providing what must be the most breathtaking view of Tower Bridge of any office in the city. Walking into it was like stepping into a spectacular landscape painting.

He paused for a moment, transfixed where he stood. To his left was Cullen’s desk and an arrangement of armchairs. A TV monitor displayed current share prices, the Starwear price prominently displayed. To his right was a huge stretch of rosewood at which Cullen and another man were sitting.

Looking up at him, Cullen smiled. ‘It’s one of the most expensive views in London.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘But worth every penny.’ Cullen met his eyes. Large, imposing, he conveyed that same winning combination of reassuring gravitas and familiarity that Chris had found so compelling the first time they’d met. As Cullen pulled out a chair beside him and gestured that Chris should come across, it was as though they’d been colleagues for a very long time.

‘Chris, I’d like you to meet Elliott North.’

The other rose to his feet and shook Chris’s hand across the table. He was dark and wiry in build, and Chris noted the curious intensity of his pale, blue eyes which blinked behind a pair of steel-framed glasses. Unusually for a PR man, he sported a neatly trimmed, almost military moustache. Chris remembered what Kate Taylor had said about North’s overzealous protectiveness of Jacob Strauss – she had made him out to seem almost obsessive. Not that there was any sign of that now. North was cordiality itself.

‘You’ll remember the conversation we had about Starwear when we first met,’ Cullen started off the proceedings.