At the dawn of my national newspaper career I recall the night editor at the Daily Mail’s Manchester office saying that readers love to read about money, meaning other people’s money.
He was admonishing me, a novice subeditor, because I had deleted what I thought was an irrelevant reference to the supposed value of a house in a story about a sacked headmaster.
I soon came to realise that house prices, no matter how incongruous to the substantive story, should always be published. As should salaries, the prices of cars and the estimated costs of clothing.
We journalists must never forget the enduring interest among our readers of that deadly sin known as envy. Money was a seller. And, needless to say, the bigger the money, the greater the appeal.
Nor was this merely tabloid lore. All social classes are fascinated by what people earn and own, as the success of the Sunday Times’s Rich List supplement was to prove after its 1989 launch.
It is surely significant that it was a newspaper writer (Frank Kent of the Baltimore Sun) who is credited with inventing the term “fat cat” in the 1920s to describe rich political donors who yearned for public honours as a recognition of their value.
Fat cattery has since widened in its usage, now referring to any man (yes, always a man) who is thought to be too wealthy for his own good. He may be guilty of doing no more than flaunting it; most often, he is linked to a news event.
So it has been for Sir Philip Green, the billionaire who sold BHS for £1 to a former bankrupt, leaving behind a multi-million pound pensions deficit.
For newspapers, he is the ultimate fat cat. If they were critical of him before he appeared at a Commons select committee in June, during which he told MPs he would “sort it” [the deficit], they were even more so afterwards.
They have delighted in running pictures of a bare-chested Green cruising on his new yacht in the Mediterranean while BHS staff continue to worry about their pensions.
On Monday, the Daily Mirror reported that Green was coming under “mounting pressure” because, it alleged, Serious Fraud Office officers were considering whether there was enough evidence to investigate if he broke the law through “fraud by misrepresentation”.
And Iain Wright, the MP who chairs the business, innovations and skills committee, told Radio 4’s Today programme he was frustrated by the lack of progress in resolving the pension deficit. Meanwhile, Green’s knighthood is said to be under review.
Green aside, wealth made headlines in several national newspapers on Monday. The Guardian reported that the chief executives of Britain’s largest public companies “typically earn 129 times more than their employees.”
It quoted the findings of the annual survey of earnings at FTSE 100 companies by the High Pay Centre, which revealed CEOs enjoying huge pay rises that widen the gap with “ordinary” workers. And, note, they all happen to be male.
The Mirror also picked up on the survey, “Fatcat chiefs get ‘shocking’ rises”, noting that the average pay package for a chief executive was £5.48m in 2015, up from £4.96m in 2014.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail was splashing on its investigation into the “astonishing... taxpayer-funded expenses and perks” claimed by senior police officers.
“On top of huge salaries,” said the paper, “some are quietly claiming ‘allowances’ of up to £32,000 a year, including for day-to-day spending and household bills.”
In its leading article, “Senior police behave like spoiled princes” [aka fat cats], the Mail rightly complained about the way in which police forces attempted to block its inquiries by rejecting freedom of information requests as “unreasonable”.
Over at the Sun, it was laying into “nearly 100 NHS fatcats [who] got six-figure payoffs from health quangos last year costing taxpayers at least £12.3million.”
Its editorial, “Wards vs wads”, pointed out that the “fatcat bosses” were part of the “waste and overspending in some parts of the NHS [which] is out of control.”
And the Daily Express devoted space to another concern about money, taking up a Taxpayers’ Alliance report which has urged the cutting of stamp duty and other taxes on home ownership “to encourage a post-Brexit boom.”
Claiming that “households and businesses are paying nearly £67bn in property taxes”, the paper called on prime minister Theresa May to relieve homeowners from “draconian taxes.”
Money, money, money. Editors know their clichés: it may be the root of all evil but it also makes the world go round... and therefore sells copies. Result? Profits for publishers! By exposing the antics of the wealthy it also reinforces the newspapers’ claim to be acting on behalf of the public. What a virtuous circle.
