The wit and wisdom of Ian Kerr

Ian Kerr’s writing was divisive. There was no question about that — you either agreed with his views or you disageed, and that of course is the secret of a good columnist. Although Ian might have blushed at the comparison, he followed in a direct literary line that stretched from Daniel Defoe through to Beachcomber in the UK or from Mark Twain to PJ O’Rourke in the US.

He was also eminently readable. Even his fiercest critics — who claimed his column was a triumph of style over substance — would read him each week. And of course his fans, and they were many, would simply say that in both style and substance he excelled. His view of his job was a simple one. A decade ago he set out his goal: "Our only objectives have been to ruffle a few feathers, tease, cajole, praise and on occasions even to applaud — contrary to popular opinion we have never set out to be deliberately destructive.

"In the highest paid industry in the world there are inevitably some hugely inflated egos. Because such feelings of self-importance are often totally unjustified, it is sometimes necessary for an outsider who used to be an insider (you don’t truly understand the business if you haven’t been there) to prick a few ego balloons — and every year we buy a new long hatpin from the Harrods gift department."

That ability to deflate the pompous often made Ian dangerous to publish.

Anticipation and dread
The subeditors in particular approached editing his column with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Anticipation in that he was always a good and entertaining read. And dread because Ian wrote right up to the brink of what was printable.

"The problem was not that Ian would be saying bad things about people or institutions for the sake of it — almost invariably his facts or inside knowledge were spot on — but could that be proven in a court of law?" said one sub-editor.

One way he found to tone down some of his views was through the creation of a mythical set of contributors — a cast of characters that might have been straight out of a Dickens novel.

Who can forget his renowned Swiss bureau chief, Brunhilde Grossrösti, sipping her coffee and eating cream cakes in a café on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, always ready to divulge the latest dirty goings-on at UBS and Credit Suisse? And then there was Heidi Von Grippenutz with her predilection for corporally punishing miscreant bankers and whom Ian described as "that stern black leather-clad disciplinarian whose clients tell her their every secret on German banking".

The statuesque Slapper Alice

Nor should we forget Mee No Li, his column’s louche hat check lady in a Hong Kong night club, always willing to exchange personal favours for hard cash and news of Asian dirty dealing. There was the monumentally statuesque Slapper Alice, behind the bar of the City pub The Dog and Puddle, Russian informant Nookya Plentiov, and many more ...

Then there was always Ian’s interpretation of the real world. And getting to grips with that was frequently confusing.

It was well known, for example, that his faithful Labrador puppy Portia had been bought a chunk of Lehman shares in the early 1990s — Ian with characteristic modesty always said that he was a mostly indifferent stockpicker — but did Portia really give him investment advice?

Certainly Ian claimed that was the case. When Portia buried the Lehman stock in the rose garden, did Ian really know that she was making a buy and hold recommendation, as he later claimed?

The Dead Canary
For almost 15 years, Ian campaigned against the move of the City to Canary Wharf. His frequent references to the wild, dangerous marshlands around the ‘Dead Canary’ hit a chord with many readers. Ian’s descriptions of the first generation of bankers as exiles cast into the windswept, desolate wastes were not such an unfair description of Canary Wharf in the early 1990s.

And when it came to individual banks and their shareholders, Ian’s remarks were an extraordinary mixture of acid wit and meticulous phraseology.

Who else but Kerr would permanently add brackets after Bank of America (Charlotte NC), immediately making the largest bank in the US sound parochial and full of good ol’ moonshine boys? Or similarly refer to the shareholders of Barclays as gentlemanly East Anglian landowners whose only expertise was in root crop farming and agricultural machinery?

An almost evangelical sense of campaigning sometimes characterised his writing. Unkinder elements said the vitriol of his remarks about the skills of ‘Chuck’ Prince or Philip Purcell were vindictive to the point of obsession. But quite often events proved him right. Some of his campaigning lasted for years. Although sympathetic enough to Charles Prince, when he succeeded the legendary Sandy Weill as top gun in Citigroup, within months he had dismissed him as a lawyer who had made good.

A similar view emerged with the demise of Morgan Stanley’s Purcell where, thanks to high level sources, he was able to follow each twist and turn of the battle for control of the bank in exquisite and hilarious detail.

But critics of this approach would be missing the point — Ian’s writing always contained a strong sense of mission. When he thought someone was unfit for the job for whatever reason, he would say so unequivocally. And he was never as spiteful as some of those whose pride he had wounded were about him.

Certainly Ian predicted with characteristic forthrightness the eventual demise of many senior names and institutions. For years he insisted that NatWest was ripe for a take over. Take for example his hyperbole in 1995:

"What a lot of fuss about National Westminster, the bank that time forgot ... any news which does not involve NatWest shooting itself in the foot is considered so unusual that the bank’s shares briefly danced a highland fling ... but does NatWest Markets possess a single banker in its ranks who is capable of closing a deal?"

He could be uncannily prescient as well, reading the writing on the wall well ahead of the others. The demise of Rolf Breuer, first at Deutsche Bank and then later at Deutsche Börse, was uncannily predicted by Kerr who, months before either event, was offering bookmaker’s odds on how long he would stay in the top job. Multifaceted
And the humour was very often tongue in cheek. His annual expeditions to Sotogrande in the south of Spain would invariably be accompanied by scathing descriptions of his fellow Brits’ tattoos, string vests and lack of refinement.

Something that strikes one from reading through his stories again are the vast array of cultural allusions. His knowledge of history was extensive and the fate of obscure battles fought between relatively unknown protagonists would be rewarmed as they formed a powerful parallel to a capital markets issue. Kerr also knew to Ian Fleming precision what shops, shoes, hats, nightspots and food the successful and cultured would patronise — they were exactly his own tastes.

But there was another side of Ian too that came out occasionally in his columns. With heart-wrenching simplicity he outlined the unexpected death of a beloved wife. So too, over the last couple of years when he battled but never quite shook off illness, he would mention his trials without the slightest trace of self-pity. It was simply part of his duties as a columnist.

Lovers of intelligent, stylish, witty writing will join with those who knew Ian in the flesh to agree that the death of Ian is a loss to us all, both as a writer and a man.