Lost at Sea (19 page)

This week I will . . .

Exercise.

Eat Healthily.

Sort out my finances. Call Capital One on 0800 . . .

“See?” says Peter. “The letter has all the technical details. You throw the letter away and keep the Post-it note!”

•   •   •

I CALL RICHARD HOLMES,
a spokesperson for Capital One. He says, “By using a Post-it note, we are attempting to highlight the key issue for potential customers, which is to contact Capital One. This initiative in no way seeks to detract from the importance of the terms and conditions which have to be read and signed by anyone applying for a card.”

•   •   •

AN IMAGE KEEPS POPPING
into my head. It’s the old days. A customer in need sits down with their bank manager, who says, “A thousand pounds? You must be crazy! I’ll give you three hundred.”

I wonder: Is there some economic sage out there who effectively invented the new way—someone who drew up a utopian image where banks would fall over one another to loan money to whoever wanted it?

And so I call Lord Brian Griffiths of Fforestfach. He’s the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, a former director of the Bank of England, and once the head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit. I’d been told that if anyone could answer that question, he could.

I ask him if this whole mess can be traced back to one man. I expect him to say something like “Oh, no, it’s far more complicated than that. It is a gradual shift. Nobody is to blame.”

But he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “I hate to say it, but I was one of the people who argued strongly in favor of it.”

“When was this?” I ask.

“December 1970,” he says. “At that time the banks were a classic cartel, very much a middle-class preserve, and I believed that the democratization of credit had to be a good thing. Everyone in principle should have access to credit.”

So in December 1970, he says, he wrote a paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs advocating a revolution in banking. The report,
Competition in Banking,
concluded: “The only way in which to make banking a competitive industry is to remove
all
obstacles to potential new entrants into the industry.”

It was, by all accounts, a key factor in the subsequent deregulation of UK banking.

•   •   •

IT BECOMES OBVIOUS
during my conversation with Lord Griffiths that he’s come to believe he’s unleashed some kind of monster. He says he never could have predicted “the dynamism” with which the lenders would pursue his ideas.

“The dynamism,” he says. “The innovation.”

I’ve never heard these words uttered with such sadness.

“I don’t think anyone would have foreseen how innovative and aggressive and competitive the financial services would become in their techniques,” he says. “The whole lot of them are to blame.” He pauses. “I’m not advocating a return to the status quo. But the pendulum has swung much too far.”

Now Lord Griffiths has just published a new report—
What Price Credit?—
which has this somewhat apocalyptic conclusion: “The sheer scale of consumer debt [£1 trillion] has made millions of households extremely vulnerable to shocks to the economy . . . such as oil price rises, acts of terrorism and wars . . . Debt is a time-bomb . . . for the fifteen million people who struggle with repayments.”

I tell Lord Griffiths about Richard Cullen’s suicide and he sighs.

“I had a friend,” he replies. “A clergyman. I met him for dinner one night. He was suffering from cancer. He broke down over dinner and confessed to me that he had thirty-two credit cards. He said he was using each card to pay off the charges on the others. He told me about the shame he felt. You could just sense the emotional pressure. I’m no doctor . . .” Lord Griffiths pauses and says, “He died soon afterward.”

Then he says that a friend of his recently compared the credit-card industry to slavery—that the lenders are the new slave masters, and the borrowers are the slaves.

I ask Lord Griffiths if he’s bombarded with credit-card junk mail and he says, “Oh yes. I probably get one every fortnight.”

I say that the Cullens were sometimes getting three or four a day. “Hm,” he says. “I would call one a fortnight bombardment.”

•   •   •

AS I WRITE THIS,
in mid-April 2006, the homeless charity Centrepoint has published a report revealing that almost a quarter of homeless youngsters surveyed have been sent letters from credit-card companies urging them to apply for loans, with interest rates as high as 29 percent. Somehow, it seems, the list brokers have been able to buy up the names of young people living in hostels and halfway houses.

Since I began writing this article, in January, I have paid Visa about £300 in interest and minimum repayments. I keep thinking I should pay my Visa debts off in full and slice the card up. But I haven’t bothered. This is because—like millions of us—I am lazy and stupid.

•   •   •

ON APRIL 26,
Wendy and two of her children arrive at Salisbury coroner’s court to hear the verdict. The coroner says the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning: an 85.7 percent saturation.

“I can tell you, Mrs. Cullen, that is very high,” he says. “That concludes the postmortem evidence. I am satisfied that his intention was to take his own life. Can I also say, Mrs. Cullen . . .”

Wendy is hoping he’s about to say something critical of the credit-card companies. But instead he says, “Thank you for coming. By gathering here together we do right by your husband. I formally close the inquest.”

There is one piece of good news. The credit-card companies have all written off the debts now.

“It makes me sad how easy it was for them to write it off,” one of Richard’s daughters tells me in the corridor outside.

The Sociopath Mind Guru and the TV Hypnotist

I
t is a Friday in April and you’d think some evangelical faith-healing show was occurring in the big brown conference room of the Ibis Hotel in Earls Court, West London. The music is pumping and the six hundred delegates are ecstatic. And it’s true that there are lots of damaged people here who’ve come to be healed. But this is no faith-healing show. The speakers are atheists. And the audience is full of people from British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, British Gas, BT, Bupa, Dixons, the Department for Work and Pensions, Ladbrokes, and Transport for London. These people have come to learn how to be better in the workplace. Now the audience jumps, cheering, to its feet. I look behind me. And I see him passing through the crowd looking like Don Corleone, square-jawed and inscrutable: Richard Bandler.

Of all the gurus who thrived during the Californian New Age gold rush of the 1970s, Bandler nowadays has by far the biggest influence, on millions of people, most of whom know nothing about him or his extraordinary past. These days nobody bothers much with naked hot-tub encounter sessions, or primal screaming, or whatever. But Bandler’s invention—NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (he’s actually the coinventor with the linguistics professor John Grinder)—is everywhere.

The training manual we delegates have been handed describes NLP as “a methodology based on the presupposition that all behavior has a structure that can be modeled, learned, taught, and changed.”

The rest of the manual is a confusing mix of psychobabble and diagrams marked “submodalities” and “kinesthetics,” etc. But from what I can gather, NLP is a way of “repatterning” the human brain to turn us into superbeings—confident, nonphobic, thin superbeings who can sell coals to Newcastle and know what people are thinking just by their eye movements. It is the theory that we are computers and can be reprogrammed as easily as computers can. You were abused as a child? That makes you a badly programmed computer who needs a spot of instant reprogramming. Forget therapy: Just turn off the bit of the brain that remembers the abuse. You aren’t selling enough houses? NLP can instantly reprogram you to become a great salesperson, or public speaker, or whatever. NLP teaches that, like computers, we are a tapestry of telltale visual and auditory clues to what’s going on inside our brains. Our winks, our tics, our seemingly insignificant choice of words—it is all a map of our innermost desires and doubts. It is the secret language of the subconscious. NLP can teach the salesperson how to read that map and act accordingly.

Some people hail the way NLP has seeped into training programs in businesses across the world. Other people say terrible things about NLP. They say it is a cult invented by a crazy man.

•   •   •

I FIRST HEARD
of Richard Bandler, NLP’s inventor (he actually coinvented the technique, with John Grinder), in 2002 when a former U.S. Special Forces soldier told me he’d watched him, two decades earlier, bring a tiny little girl into Special Forces and reprogram her to be a world-class sniper in seconds. Intrigued, I tried to learn more. This is when I heard about the good times, how Bandler’s theories were greeted with high praise in the 1970s and 1980s, how Al Gore and Bill Clinton and practically every Fortune 500 corporate chief declared themselves fans, and then there was the descent into the dark side. Reportedly, during the 1980s, the coked-up Bandler had a habit of telling people he could dial a number and have them killed just like that. Then came the murder trial. In 1988 Bandler was tried and acquitted of murdering a prostitute, Corine Christensen. She’d been found slumped over a dining table, a bullet in her head. Her blood was found sprayed on Bandler’s shirt. And then there was the renaissance in the form of Bandler’s unexpected partnership with the TV hypnotist Paul McKenna, and the fact that they were going to be teaching a course together this week at the Ibis Hotel.

In the end I will get to meet Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna, and extraordinary things will occur when I do, but the road to those meetings will prove to be a rocky one.

•   •   •

EARLIER TODAY
I had coffee with Sue Crowley. She’s been friendly with Paul McKenna for years, since back in the days when he was touring regional theaters, hypnotizing people into believing they were kangaroos. Before that he was a DJ—at Topshop, then Radio Caroline, and finally Capital FM radio. Back then the idea that he’d one day hook up with Richard Bandler would have seemed as likely as David Copperfield becoming business partners with L. Ron Hubbard. But, Sue said, “Paul was like a dog with a bone when he first learned of Richard. He studied him at seminars. He modeled Richard like nobody’s ever modeled anyone before.”

Modeling is a practice at the heart of NLP. This is how McKenna has described Bandler’s invention of modeling: “If someone’s got a skill that you want to master, you ‘model’ that skill so that you can learn to do what they do in a fraction of the time it took them. Say someone’s a master salesperson. They’ll be doing certain things with their body, and certain things with their language. So you ‘model’ that. Study it, break it down, work out the thinking behind it.”

Sue said Paul McKenna was incredibly nervous about approaching Richard Bandler before he finally did, in 1994, to suggest they go into business together. Since then, NLP has—thanks to McKenna’s skills—become bigger than ever, a vast empire that’s making everyone millions.

“Paul is an unexpected protégé of Richard’s,” Sue said. “The squeaky-clean DJ and the . . . uh . . .” She paused, not knowing which bits of the Richard Bandler life history to mention, in case I didn’t know the full extent of the horror. “The . . . uh . . . Hells Angel, up for God knows what, CIA . . . But Richard Bandler is a Leonardo of our times. He is one of our living greats.”

(Much later, by the way, after this story appears in the
Guardian
, I’ll chance upon a flier advertising a Richard Bandler seminar. It’ll read: “Richard Bandler is a Leonardo of our times. He is one of our living greats—The Guardian.”)

Now “Purple Haze” booms through the speakers and Richard Bandler climbs onto the stage. He hushes the crowd. They sit down. I am momentarily lost in my thoughts and I remain standing.

“ARE—YOU—GOING—TO—SIT—DOWN—NOW?” hisses a voice in my ear. I jump. It is one of Paul McKenna’s assistants. I hurriedly sit down.

“I marched up the Amazon,” Bandler tells the audience. “I threatened gurus to get them to tell me their secrets. They’re pretty cooperative when you hold them over the edge of a cliff.”

There is laughter.

“There was one Indian guru,” Bandler continues, “I was holding him over the edge of a cliff. I said to him, ‘My hand is getting tired. You have seven seconds to tell me your secrets.’ Well, he told me them fast and in perfect English!”

I have to say that had I been tried for murder, I would be less forthcoming with the murder gags. Practically every one of Richard Bandler’s jokes is murder- or at least violent-crime related. I hope—when I finally get to meet him—to ask him about the murder trial, although I’m nervous at the prospect of this.

Suddenly, we hear a loud noise from somewhere outside.

“A ghost,” Bandler says. “I do have ghosts that follow me around. And they’re angry ghosts. But I don’t care. The truth is, the ghosts are more afraid of me than I am of them.”

He is mesmerizing. Two hours pass in a flash. He talks about childhood trauma. He puts on a whiny voice: “When I was five I wanted a pony . . . my parents told me I was ugly . . . ‘Shut the fuck up!’”

He gets the audience to chant it: “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” If you hear voices in your head, he says, tell the voices to shut the fuck up. “If you suffered childhood abuse, don’t go back and relive it in your mind. Once is enough!”

He says psychotherapy is nonsense and a racket: Therapists are rewarded for failure. The longer a problem lasts, the more the therapist is paid. Who cares about the roots of the trauma?

“Don’t think about bad things!” Bandler says. “There’s a machine inside your brain that gets rid of shit that doesn’t need to be there. Use it! I can give myself amnesia. I can just forget.” He clicks his fingers. “Just like that.”

This seven-day training course is costing delegates £1,500 each. Which means Paul McKenna’s company will rake in almost a million pounds for this one week’s work. The tea and biscuits may be free but we have to buy our own lunch. For all the hero-worship of McKenna and Bandler, there’s still a lot of grumbling about this, especially because whenever we traipse out into the rain to try and find somewhere to eat in this crappy part of town, we’re compelled to traipse past Paul McKenna’s immaculate chauffeur-driven silver Bentley, number plate 75PM, parked up in the ugly forecourt, waiting to swish Richard Bandler off somewhere unimaginably fancier.

•   •   •

IT IS LUNCHTIME NOW.
I walk past the Bentley. A delegate sidles up to me. “You’re a very naughty boy!” she says. “Richard will be very cross with you!”

“What?” I practically yell.

“You kept writing when Richard was talking even though you
know
you weren’t supposed to!” she says. “And you didn’t have a smile on your face. Everyone was laughing, but you were scowling.”

I missed yesterday’s session, which is perhaps why everyone is so far ahead of me in the frenzied-adoration stakes. In fact, earlier today Richard Bandler said he had no unhappy clients. His exact words were “The reason why all my clients are a success is that I killed all the ones who weren’t.”

Lots of delegates have told me they signed up because of the TV star Paul McKenna but the great revelation has been the man they hadn’t heard of: Richard Bandler.

•   •   •

THREE OF PAUL MCKENNA’S
NLP-inspired self-help books (
Change Your Life in 7 Days
,
Instant Confidence
—which is dedicated to Bandler—and
I Can Make You Thin
)
are currently in the WHSmith Top 10. So that’s the therapy side. The NLP-can-do-wonders-for-your-business side is thriving too. In fact when I meet Iain Aitken, the managing director of McKenna’s company, he says the phobic delegates are becoming the minority now that NLP has become so widespread in the business world. I ask Iain what is it about NLP that attracts the salespeople. Bandler, he replies, teaches that everyone has a dominant way of perceiving the world through seeing, hearing, or feeling. If a customer says, “I see what you mean,” that makes them a visual person. The NLP-trained salesperson will spot the clue and establish rapport by mirroring the language.

“I get the picture,” the NLP-trained salesperson can reply, rather than “That rings a bell” or “That feels good to me.”

•   •   •

AFTER LUNCH,
we split into small groups to practice NLP techniques on one another. I pair up with Vish, who runs a property company in the Midlands.

“What did I miss yesterday?” I ask him.

“It was great,” he says. “We did anchoring. Let me show you how it works.”

Vish moves his chair closer to mine.

“How are you enjoying your time here?” he asks me.

“OK,” I say.

Vish pokes my elbow.

“Brilliant!” he says. “Did you have a good lunch?”

“It was all right,” I say.

Vish prods my elbow again.

“Fantastic!” he says. “Have you got kids?”

“A son,” I say.

“Did you have fun with him last weekend?” he asks.

“Yes, I did,” I say.

Vish pokes my elbow.

“Brilliant!” he says. “Now. Did you notice what I was doing?”

“You were poking my elbow every time I expressed positive feeling,” I say.

“Exactly!” says Vish, although he looks peeved that I spotted the poking, which is supposed to be so subtle as to exist only on the unconscious level.

“Now,” says Vish. “When I want to sell you something, I’ll touch your elbow and you’ll associate that touch with a good feeling, and you’ll want to buy. That’s deep psychology.” Vish pauses. “What I really like about NLP is how it can hypnotize and manipulate people. But in a good way.”

•   •   •

I STAND UP
to stretch my legs and I spot Paul McKenna at the front, near the stage. Even though I’m still supposed to be doing the small-group workshop, I decide to introduce myself. I take a few steps toward McKenna. Instantly, one of his assistants swoops down on me. There are about forty assistants in all, scattered around the room.

“Do you need help?” she asks me.

“No,” I say.

“Have you
finished
the workshop already?” she asks sarcastically.

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, you must have finished quicker than everyone else because everyone else is still doing it,” she says.

“I’m a journalist and I’m going to talk to Paul McKenna,” I say.

I walk on. Ten steps later, two more assistants appear from nowhere.

“Aren’t you joining in?” asks one.

“You’re going to miss all the benefits,” says the other.

“I’m OK, honestly,” I say.

Another assistant appears.

“Didn’t you understand your instruction?” he says. “Paul explained
three times
that you’re supposed to do the workshop for fifteen minutes.”

Finally, exhausted, I reach Paul McKenna. I introduce myself.

“How did you end up in business with Richard Bandler?” I ask him.

“I know!” he says. “It seems incredible from the outside. But he’s one of my best friends . . .” Then he excuses himself to do a spot of speed-healing on an overeater.

•   •   •

AN HOUR LATER
Paul McKenna’s PR rep, Jaime, tells me in the corridor quite sternly that I am not to hang out with Paul or Richard before, between, or after sessions because they’re far too busy and tired. I can meet them next Wednesday, she says, when the course is over. I go home. I don’t think I have ever, in all my life, had so many people try to control me in one single day. Advocates and critics alike say attaining a mastery of NLP can be an excellent way of controlling people, so I suppose the training courses attract that sort of person. Ross Jeffries, author of
How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed
, is a great NLP fan, as is Duane Lakin, author of
The Unfair Advantage: Sell with NLP!
(Both books advocate the “That
feels
good to me” style of mirroring/rapport-building invented by Bandler.)