Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (13 page)

I am mindful we still have to discuss the grand theme in his book – the ethics of globalization, personal responsibility and social progress – but first I ask about his circuitous route to the top of HSBC, formerly Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and now one of the world’s biggest financial institutions.

After university Green worked in a centre for recovering alcoholics (‘a vicar came to Oxford and inspired me’) before starting his career as a civil servant at what was then the Overseas Development Administration.

‘The furthest I got was Paris,’ he recalls. Frustrated, he won a Harkness fellowship to the US, completing a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1977 he joined McKinsey, the management consultancy, and stayed until 1982, when, at 34, he was headhunted to join HSBC in Hong Kong. He has been with the bank ever since.

Our waiter arrives with gazpacho and mackerel, along with the bread basket. Munching a roll, I ask Green what were the highlights of his time in Hong Kong. It was, he says, setting up new business systems, then frets that he sounds like an ‘anorak’.

Green, with his wife Janian and two daughters, returned to Britain in 1992 when HSBC bought Midland Bank. He published his first book in 1996, which sought to reconcile serving God with serving Mammon. This is a genuine dilemma for Green, made more acute by the global financial crisis.

Good Value
wrestles with the demands of individual responsibility and the market but it is set in a broader economic and historical context. Green’s ambition is to make the case for globalization as an inevitable, progressive force and as a human phenomenon.

‘Let’s look at the positives: human cross-cultural fertilization and enrichment; the delivery of economic development around the world; higher productivity … and in recent times globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, particularly in China and India. These [benefits] are material, spiritual and cultural.’

And the negatives? ‘There is something about the market system which is inherently unstable,’ says Green, referring to financial bubbles from tulip mania in the 17th century to the 21st-century crash originating in the subprime lending market. ‘This is a tiger we are seeking to ride by its tail.’ Other negatives, says Green, include social marginalization and climate change. Green is in full flow so I pass on reminding him of HSBC’s disastrous foray into the subprime arena with the 2002 purchase of Household Bank in the US.

By now, he has polished off the cod, and my chicken is surprisingly succulent. It is time to press Green on his sunny view of social progress, especially in Britain, which he argues is less racist, less class-ridden and less sexist than a generation ago. ‘Well, I don’t know whether you can measure it … and it’s not like these things have disappeared. But about 80 per cent of this country considers itself middle class. I doubt that was true then.’

Green’s preoccupation with ethical responsibility and social progress has deep roots, no deeper than his admiration for a relatively obscure Jesuit priest, palaeontologist and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose masterwork
The Phenomenon of Man
was first published posthumously in 1955.

De Chardin might be characterized as a sort of Thomas Friedman for the religiously inclined. Whereas the
New York Times
columnist is the bestselling author of globalization primer
The World is Flat
, the Frenchman saw the world as a sphere, both literally and metaphorically. In his book, Green quotes de Chardin’s view that the evolutionary ascent of human beings occurs in two stages. First, humanity expands around the globe, both in quantity and spiritual development. Second, in the 20th century, as the planet is increasingly populated, a collective memory is formed. Thus globalization is about something far deeper than economics, commerce and politics. Green tells me, ‘It is about the evolution of the human spirit.’

Green speaks in a calm, unruffled cadence but also with inner
conviction. Disarmingly honest about personal matters, he confesses, for example, that he wrote his book with the assistance of the former
FT
journalist Richard Addis (once a novice Anglican monk). The two exchanged numerous drafts, often at weekends.

Even more striking is how he deals with his book’s second grand theme: the ‘pervasive moral ambiguity’ that he detects inside human beings and the outside world. At the end of the book, for example, there is a passage of poignant self-examination in which Green describes visiting Weimar, the home of Goethe at the time he wrote
Faust
, and which is close to Buchenwald, the notorious Nazi concentration camp.

‘We tell ourselves we cannot imagine working with human skin as if it were leather. But perhaps I can see myself getting caught up in such an ordinary procedure as this,’ he writes. ‘I can see myself losing sight of ulterior objectives, motives, values – becoming so engrossed in a debate about whether regulation a or b applies in situation x, that I no longer notice what x actually stands for.’

Green’s admission is superficially shocking but, as he argues in his book, can an individual ever know for certain whether he or she would have the moral courage to stand up to tyranny and totalitarianism?

Bringing the conversation back to the present, I say that the parallels with contemporary capitalism are obvious. Too many bankers followed the letter but not the spirit of the law. I wonder, therefore, whether it is fair to draw a distinction – as many Europeans do – between Anglo-Saxon capitalism, which elevates individual self-interest, and Calvinist capitalism, which emphasizes the collective good?

‘I am a European,’ says Green, with passion. ‘And so are you.’ He sees the British as European, and as a committed pro-European he believes there should not be a distinction. I stand reprimanded. But I still want to explore whether Green believes in the innate superiority of different capitalist models, particularly the Anglo-Saxon emphasis on shareholder value. He says, ‘Shareholder value cannot and should not be elevated to the exclusion of all else. It is a by-product of providing goods and services. When the by-product becomes the end, then we distort the whole market. The market is necessary but not sufficient. So “No” to market fundamentalism.’

It is a nuanced view of shareholder value but he makes his point emphatically – and as he does so, with a sweep of those arms, Green
knocks over a glass, sending a flood of water over my notebook. He is mortified: ‘I suppose that’s going to be published,’ he says, half pleadingly. ‘You bet,’ I respond, mopping up a sea of watery blue ink with a crisp white napkin.

Our waiter arrives with napkin reinforcements. We skip dessert and opt for herbal tea. I ask Green what he is reading at the moment. It’s
Der Turm
(The Tower), Uwe Tellkamp’s prize-winning 2008 novel set in the twilight years of former communist East Germany. He is ecstatic about this epic, nearly 1,000-page, book.

And this brings him back once again to the ‘heights and depths’ of German history and culture – and reveals a surprising ambition. Green’s dream is to write a history that captures the linear development of German culture and history: from Henry IV’s walk from Speyer to Canossa, where the German Holy Roman Emperor sought to reverse his excommunication; through to Martin Luther, the Thirty Years War, the unification of Germany, Nazism, and finally a reunited Germany regaining its moorings in a united Europe.

There is enough material here for another lunch, let alone another book. We must leave, although the herbal tea has still not arrived. As we walk out, I am left with a thought: as God’s banker, Green may have a bleeding heart but he really does possess iron in the soul.

3 FEBRUARY 1996

The
FT
met the industrialist before he announced the break-up of his conglomerate this week

By Nigel Spivey

Hanson hails from Viking stock. So does Spivey. Eye to eye at the altitude of 6ft 2in, we measured each other up. Hanson’s ancestry lies in Huddersfield; Spivey’s, around Leeds. Perhaps our forebears once shared a longboat, and pillaged south Yorkshire together. Then their ways parted.

The Spiveys disowned a regrettable past – the surname is said to mean ‘sheep-stealer’ in Old Norse – and took to evangelism. The Hansons, meanwhile, relinquished pillage for haulage. Theirs was the road to riches. Transporting goods around the country is the olden basis of the present global Hanson empire. ‘I don’t care if people know about my salary,’ breezed Hanson the Bold. ‘I implemented Greenbury rules before they were even invented. You can tell the readers of your left-wing paper precisely what it is.’

(For the benefit of the
Financial Times
’s two or three Marxist faithfuls, let us get that over with: £1,362,000 a year.)

We met at The Berkeley, round the corner from Hanson’s headquarters in Grosvenor Place. Although it is elegant and roomy, the prices are modest, the fare decent and uncomplicated. It amused Hanson, plainly a regular at our corner table, that the bill would be met by this left-wing paper. ‘My host will have this,’ he would say, with a ducal wave, ‘bring a
bottle of house claret for my host.’ His trim charm never faltered. Well, hardly ever. We shall come to that.

Hanson belongs to a select caucus of Anglo-American advisers to Conrad Black, the media emperor. Included in the membership are Margaret Thatcher and other such oracles of the right as William F. Buckley. Hanson himself is a journalist manqué. And not so manqué, either. Just before we met, he had been peppering the press with the thoughts of Chairman Hanson on Europe, roads and education. I had seen his blast of Euroscepticism (in Black’s weekly, the
Spectator
), but not the roads and education. These were two hobby-horses which he happily exercised over our lunch.

‘Road tax should be for roads,’ he declared. ‘£23bn a year we pay to use ’em, and precious little of that gets spent where it should – repairing the highways, building new ones. The government’s simply ignoring the constituency of drivers, and listening too much to these good earth people.’

Good earth people?

‘The hippies you see blocking us in the Mendips. Not Friends of the Earth at all, just rent-a-mob.’

One would hardly expect a Viking-turned-haulier to think otherwise: especially when a chunk of his conglomerate interests lies in the production of road-building aggregates. Warming to my role as buccaneer from the left-wing press, I opined that in an overcrowded island like ours, it was time to abandon roads and cars.

He snorted: ‘Yes. And abandon all our growth prospects, too.’

‘But you value your place in the country,’ I protested.

‘So?’ replied Hanson. ‘Peter Palumbo’s got a motorway going straight past his estate. He’s not stopping it. He’s planting trees to screen it off.’

I wondered (to myself) what the non-Palumbos do if, for some petty reason, they lack the capacity to put a forest between themselves and one of Hanson’s highways. Hanson himself migrates for five months of the year to Palm Springs in California, where he likes to nip around on a bicycle. Before I could point out that the rent-a-mob folk prefer two wheels to four, we were on to the next hobby-horse.

‘Schools,’ Hanson cantered, ‘are turning out morons. They come to us for employment, but they’re utterly unemployable. Arithmetic,
spelling – no better than 10-year-olds. There’s nothing we can offer them. I blame this child-centred education. What about you?’

I muttered something about computers turning children into vegetables. And something else about overcrowded classrooms. These were not factors in Hanson’s analysis.

‘Teachers need a shake-up. Kids aren’t at school to enjoy themselves. It’s time teachers did some teaching. Don’t tell me it’s underfunding. We spend more of our national income on education than the Germans or the Japanese.’

I asked when he thought the rot had descended on British education. ‘About 30 years ago,’ he said. ‘Yes, well,’ I said, ‘the government’s got a lot to answer for.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Hanson. ‘It’s the teachers. Obdurate lot, won’t take change.’

The morons issuing from British schools will not find work in Hanson’s company. His son, however, is doing well. Was he being groomed for succession?

‘Robert came in completely of his own accord,’ said Hanson. ‘Surprised me. I never put him up to it at all.’

He admits that the City is not well disposed towards his conglomerate, or indeed any conglomerate. His holdings range from cranes to cod liver oil. I asked him if his many interests outside Britain had developed because of Thatcher’s torpedo on British industry. ‘Margaret didn’t shut things down,’ he snapped. ‘Only you academics say that, in your ignorance. She enabled.’