a permanent basis. Second, he wanted nothing more to do with Richard Branson. Whatever the reason – whether perhaps he drank too much and became aggressive, or whether simply the personal chemistry had been wrong – Branson’s charm offensive had failed totally. Elliott turned down the proposal.
But Richard Branson’s interest had been tickled, and it was too late to go back. If Elliott would not start Stepping Out in partnership with him, then he was quite entitled to do it on his own. And thus it was that Branson set to work hiring an editorial staff for a new London listings magazine to fill the gap left by the old Time Out. The team was assembled in three months, and the first edition of the magazine – which Branson decided to call Event – appeared in September.
There was just one problem. A week earlier, Elliott’s former employees had established City Limits, their own listings magazine. A week before that, Elliott himself had come back with a new Time Out, staffed by a fresh corps of journalists but in many respects identical to the old. To make matters worse, Elliott had put some subtle changes into effect during the months that his magazine was off the streets. ‘Agitprop’ became less strident, and was renamed ‘Politics’; a gay section, previously vetoed by the staff on the grounds that it was ‘ghettoist’, brought together the clubs and events of most interest to homosexuals; the ‘Sell Out’ department provided more pages of consumer and shopping news than before; and a much-overdue section on nightlife covered a subject that the magazine’s former staff had dismissed as trivial and politically incorrect. The new Time Out’s first cover story, symbolizing the nascent metropolitan affluence appearing under Margaret Thatcher, was about all-night London.
Elliott knew that he would face competition, for Branson had poached Pearce Marchbank, Time Out’s design guru, to co-edit Event with Al Clark. But Event proved to be a damp squib. Its editorial approach was just a little too middlebrow; it went in for slightly tacky competitions; and it committed a fundamental error by printing the listings – for many readers, the magazine’s principal attraction – in a point size so small that it was barely legible. The staff were at each other’s throats.
Despite the undoubted literary and artistic talents of the team that Branson had assembled, the magazine soon began to go downhill. The real competition to Elliott’s new Time Out was not Event, but City Limits. As the months roiled on, Time Out’s circulation began to rise above 60,000; City Limits stayed put at around 30,000; and Event declined, equally immune to changes of personnel and of style, to below 20,000 by the turn of the year. Tina Brown, later to become editor of the Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, described Branson’s venture with scathing accuracy as ‘a triumph of managerial incompetence over editorial flair’.
Proof of the fall in the magazine’s morale could be seen in its in-house magazine. As if it was not enough of a struggle to put the next issue of Event together, a group of mischievous members of the magazine’s staff decided to start an underground gossip sheet, entirely for internal consumption, that would chronicle its lurching progress from issue to issue. The sheet was called Non-Event, Rod Vickery, usually one of Branson’s most faithful lieutenants, did the artwork, while another couple of employees wrote the stories and a fourth ran off a copy for the desk of each member of staff. Terry Baughan, the man in charge of the Virgin Group’s finances at the time, was at first speechless with fury. ‘I’d love to get my hands on the people who did that,’ he said. Vickery, kept safe from suspicion by virtue not only of his long service but also of his seniority in the company, said nothing.
The tough decisions forced on Branson by the tottering fortunes of his magazine turned Event’s journalists against him. Jonathan Meades, one of the later editors he appointed, recalled that Branson had disputed a £30 expense claim submitted by the magazine’s film critic. ‘But he also had three phones going at the same time, and on one of them he was trying to sign the Stranglers for £300,000,’ Meades remembered. The experience of working for Branson also left him with a jaded impression of the young entrepreneur. ‘He’s impossible to conduct a conversation with because he is inarticulate … Branson’s very good at making money, but the rest of him hasn’t kept up. It’s like a form of autism.’
But Branson was never one to give up. With creditable bravado, he telephoned Elliott six months later. Brushing aside Elliott’s questions about the restyles and the firings at Event, Branson came straight to the point.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a really good run with the Human League. We’ve done really well, and I’ve got at least three-quarters of a million pounds sitting in the bank. I can either put it into Event, or I could put it into Time Out.’
Elliott, who was a little drunk at the time, took a deep breath before he responded.
‘Richard,’ he said. ‘There’s one thing you don’t realize. You should stop this mission to acquire all or part of Time Out. At the end of the day, my readers don’t respect you. They see you as an opportunist, as someone without genuine cultural integrity.’
Cultural integrity he may have lacked; but Richard Branson had an almost unlimited capacity to swallow failures and humiliations. ‘Business opportunities are like buses,’ he liked to say. ‘There’s always another coming along.’ And so with barely a pause for self-doubt, Branson plunged back into the daily concerns of his record business, his ability to sniff out a good deal heightened by the awareness that Virgin’s losses on Event had brought it perilously close to insolvency. It was not to be long, however, before Branson’s thoughts had returned to publishing. If he was not cut out to be a magazine proprietor, why should he not own a film company? A video production business? A cable television company? A radio station? The thought may even have crossed his mind, albeit briefly, of owning a newspaper.
Unfortunately, the early omens were not good. Branson already owned one publishing business, known as Virgin Books, and it was not going well. He had received an approach in 1979 from a man called Maxim Jakubowski, whose main area of expertise was in the food industry but who fancied himself as a publisher of books. But Jakubowski was not as successful a publisher as he was a negotiator; and in less than two years, it had become clear that Virgin Books was in trouble. Among the weird ideas he had put into practice was a series of short novels written by rock stars; at one stage he even wanted to publish a book about chickens that had appeared in the movies. But the company’s core problem under his stewardship was that it was trying to do too many things. Unable to choose even between fiction and non-fiction, Virgin Books was a small and not very successful publisher. In an ill-advised interview with the Financial Times, Branson had boasted that the company would publish books by undiscovered young talents, and would be looking for the literary equivalent of Mike Oldfield. It never found it.
Even before relations with Jakubowski began to deteriorate, however, Branson realized that he needed to bring someone into the publishing company whom he could trust. He knew exactly whom to ask for advice: his younger sister Vanessa’s boyfriend, Robert Devereux, who worked at Macmillan, one of the grander names in British publishing. Devereux was twenty-five years old, and very bright indeed. He also had the tactical advantage of having beaten Branson regularly at chess. A lunch was arranged on the houseboat to which Devereux brought with him Rob Shreeve, his boss at Macmillan. Branson put his proposal: the two men should come to Virgin and sort out its books business. Shreeve, older and perhaps a little wiser than Devereux, wanted to know just how committed Branson was to his book publishing division. How much money did he think he would be able to invest in it? How many titles might it expect to bring out over the coming year? Whatever the answers were, it became clear that Devereux would join Virgin; Shreeve, though grateful for the lunch, would politely decline.
Devereux moved fast on his arrival at Virgin Books. He fired some of the staff, and frightened others into working harder. He threw out Jakubowski’s strategy, and tried to decide how the small publishing company he was now in
